Space Oddities

How has. The 1975, once called the worst rock band in the world, come to be regarded as the truest voice of the millennial generation? Frontman Matty Healy walks around the New York of a bygone era to look for answers

- Nidhi Gupta

Whatever attraction The 1975, a British rock band, holds for its many fans, a shared interest in the year 1975 is probably not among them. Certainly the events of that nadir of a year, which include the fall of Saigon and the near bankruptcy of New York City, do not overly concern the band’s frontman, Matty Healy, who was born in 1989 and grew up in Manchester, UK.

Nevertheless, on a recent visit to New York, Healy gamely agreed to walk the winter blocks around his East Village hotel in search of the 1975 that New Yorkers of a certain age remember. He soon found himself in a café, Physical Graffitea, at 96 St Marks Place – the building that, together with No 98, appeared on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 album, Physical Graffiti. Healy wore a long wool coat, a red sweater with white rose patterns on it and different-coloured socks. He is in his late 20s – a fatal age for some of his rock star predecessors – but while vampire-pale and thin, Healy looked healthy. (“I’ve stopped doing drugs!” he declared, after pausing to read a plaque at 57 Great Jones, the Warhol-owned building where Jean-Michel Basquiat died, at 27, in 1988.)