Matt Johnson had the world by the balls when his bittersweet synth-pop classic “This Is the Day” broke through in 1983.
The The’s baritone-voiced frontman (appearing with his band at Oakland’s Fox Theater, Thu/7) had recently begun dating Fiona Skinner, whose modest London bedsit doubled as the makeshift studio where Johnson first devised album Soul Mining’s second single, expressing gratitude for recent gains and fear over future losses, as well as its equally revered follow-up, “Uncertain Smile.”
Those two numbers helped the group get signed to CBS Records and afforded them the ability to cut their tracks in proper New York studios.
Skinner, a graphic designer, created the font for the Soul Mining cover as well as the British post-punk band’s signature logo. But by the time she directed the video for the rerecorded version of the song, a decade later, the partnership had soured.
For those in the dark, the bright sight of the pair captured in the 1993 promo, amicably hugging on Alcatraz Island after officially splitting in San Francisco, suggested an easy breakup. But, according to Johnson, it wasn’t quite so painless.
“It was in San Francisco that we decided to separate,” he says. “It was amicable, but we got very drunk and wandered around the streets very emotional, laughing and crying.”
Passing a tattoo and piercing parlor, on a whim the two decided to get matching “divorce rings” on their navels. Feeling adventurous in his intoxicated state, Johnson went a step further, adding a scrotum piercing—a total surprise when he awakened the next morning.
“We woke up in a San Francisco hotel room hung over,” says the singer. “There was blood from the piercings, and we didn’t remember what we’d done. We were like, ‘What the hell has happened?’”
To promote his searing new album, Ensoulment, Johnson is back performing in the Bay for the first time since 2018.
His current show consists of two setlists, starting with the new record in its entirety followed by a retrospective set, incorporating selections from every album including 1993’s Dusk, whose companion film, From Dusk Till Dawn, features a cameo from San Francisco icon Annie Sprinkle.
As the title of the band’s first LP in 25 years suggests, Ensoulment—coproduced by Warne Livesey, who previously worked on the group’s late-‘80s classics Infected and Mind Bomb—aims to infuse meaning into today’s AI-driven world as it wrestles with alienation, grief, and political disillusionment.
For instance, “Some Days I Drink My Coffee By The Grave Of William Blake,” inspired by visiting Central London’s Bunhill Fields cemetery, where dissenters like the Romantic poet are buried, waxes about estrangement in an ever-changing, repressive Britain.
The experimental “Linoleum Smooth To The Stockinged Foot” is constructed around Johnson’s trippy, morphine and antibiotic-induced recollections of wandering the linoleum-floored corridors of a London hospital in stockinged feet as he recovered from a near-fatal throat infection in the early days of the COVID pandemic.
With the imminent threat of losing his singing voice from surgery and the denial of any visitors afterward, this track gets its jubilance from the fact that Johnson can sing it after making a full recovery.
“I feel incredible relief mixed with gratitude that I didn’t lose my voice,” says the singer, who couldn’t croon for six months after the operation. “I certainly don’t take it for granted. I do all I can to look after it.”
The driving “Zen & The Art Of Dating” finds Johnson’s lovelorn characters desperately seeking connection in a foreboding landscape of superficial encounters.
Hopefulness is found in the lyric: “Though it’s a cliché—maybe it’s true?/That only when you stop searching for love/Will love come searching for you.”
Two of the most powerful tracks on the album are about grief, a topic Johnson knows all too well, after losing both parents, two of three siblings, and many friends.
“Life After Life” examines mortality and the great beyond. “Where Do We Go When We Die?”, a eulogy to his late father, emphasizes that renewal is as inevitable as loss.
Having already written the elegy “Love Is Stronger Than Death” for younger brother Eugene, “Phantom Walls” for his mother, and “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming” for older brother Andrew (best known for designing The The’s album cover art), Johnson doesn’t want to make a habit of this practice.
“Sadly, I’ve experienced quite a lot of grief,” he says. “Writing those songs is something I find very therapeutic in helping me get through it. Still, I hope this song is my last about somebody that I love dying because I don’t want to keep going through that again. Time is a wonderful healer but it won’t bring somebody back.”
Johnson says the creative process of working out new material on acoustic guitar, recording it with a band, and then playing it in front of a live audience still thrills him.
“When it’s going well, I feel inspired and get goosebumps and my hair stands on end,” says the singer. “Sometimes I cry because I feel so moved.”
He’s super excited to perform for a Bay Area audience for the first time in six years.
His romance with San Francisco started at 15 when he first visited Fog City with his family in the mid-’70s.
“I loved the hills, riding on trams, and visiting Chinatown and Alcatraz Island,” says Johnson.
Alcatraz would, of course, become the spot that he and future girlfriend Fiona Skinner famously hugged after unshackling each other.
Although “This Is the Day” takes on new meaning with each loss, says the singer—busy mining his early material for a new box set, working on a career-chronicling book, reissuing The Inertia Variations on Blu-ray, and even getting back into the studio to record new material—he’s always excited to play the track that’s become one of the band’s most definitive after myriad appearances in ad campaigns and films.
“It always goes down well live, and it means a lot to people,” says Johnson. “But it is emotional for me because I referenced my family, who were in the original video, and those four family members are not with me anymore. In a way, it’s become more relevant.”
THE THE Thu/7, Fox Theater, Oakland. Tickets and more info here.
