Aged 14 at the time, I had just seen Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, and for a time in my schoolboy mind, Johnson became virtually interchangeable with Sean Chapman’s character, a gleaming torso-ed Faust about to unleash Hades from a box. Meanwhile, the single’s limited edition “torture” sleeve pictured the singer stripped to the waist in a hotel room, neck veins bulging, seemingly in the throes of some psychic meltdown, like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. The video to the title track of The The’s 1986 album Infected saw Johnson growling the song while strapped to a gurney like Hannibal Lecter, before being torched alive by Bolivian peasants. Exhibiting a near-pyromaniacal obsession with images of hell and burning, this was a man who seemed to make music from inside the flames of his own private purgatory.
Of all the intense young men making art from angst in the UK post-punk/New Wave scene of the mid-80’s, The The‘s Matt Johnson was perhaps the fiercest.
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