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Matt Johnson photographed for the FT at his home in Shoreditch, London beforehand this ages © Tom Jamieson

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Pity poor Bruno Brookes. It was summer 1989, and the mulletted DJ was on assignment presenting BBC1’s Thursday night blueprint caricature Top of the Pops. The The were authoritative their aboriginal alive actualization on the show, assuming “The Beat(en) Generation”. “Our youth, oh youth, are actuality seduced/ By the acquisitive easily of backroom and half-truths,” sang Matt Johnson over guitar arpeggios from Johnny Marr, backward of The Smiths. Come the chorus, Johnson appropriate the titular bearing had been “reared on a diet of ageism and misinformation”. At the end of the song, the cameras cut to Brookes, who reacted the alone way accessible for a man constitutionally conditioned to batty accessible cheerfulness: “Fabbo!”

Twenty-eight years later, in the east London architecture that is his base, Johnson contrasts his grim-faced accessible angel with the actuality he acquainted himself to be. His persona as pop’s augury of doom “was a advantageous accessory for me. The [press] were advancing a actuality who didn’t exist, so I didn’t booty it personally.”

Johnson is 56 now, and The The accept been added or beneath bashful for 17 years. There accept been three humble blur soundtracks, but no new anthology of songs aback NakedSelf in 2000. He was captivated by inertia, which itself has somehow led him into what he allows is a comeback. Aboriginal up is a bluntly appropriate triple-album set, Radio Cinéola: Trilogy: one disc of added bodies assuming Johnson’s songs, forth with Johnson singing a new The The song, addition of Johnson account an adapt of John Tottenham’s composition “The Apathy Variations”, and a third of interviews and soundscapes from Johnson’s Radio Cinéola broadcasts. Again there is a documentary, The Apathy Variations — partly about Radio Cinéola, partly about Johnson’s absence, and his family.

Next year he allotment to the date for the aboriginal time aback assuming at David Bowie’s Meltdown in 2002: three big London shows ample out in minutes. There will be new songs, he says, and there will be a able new The The anthology at some point.

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The blackout was precipitated by the abrupt afterlife of his adolescent brother, Eugene, in 1989. Although Johnson connected to work, it was a abiding struggle. “It was about like a slow-motion collapse,” he says. The improvement was spurred by the afterlife of his earlier brother, Andrew, aboriginal aftermost year. “Andrew and I were abundantly close; he was apparently the better access on me creatively. Suddenly, accepting that gone from my life, it angry that faculty of urgency. I did a lot of soul-searching. I’ve got to get aback to what I adulation doing. I feel in a way as if someone’s angry on the oxygen accumulation again. I feel energised and excited.”

Johnson was the prodigy of British absolute music, arising from the London post-punk arena in his backward teens. By the age of 20 he’d appear his aboriginal album; by 22 he’d recorded his aboriginal masterpiece — the adulation song “Uncertain Smile” — but his mid-twenties saw him accept his longstanding Cassandra guise. The The’s albums Infected and Mind Bomb were state-of-the-nation addresses in which acclamation was boilerplate to be found, admitting it was the added claimed — but appropriately austere — Dusk that became his better hit, extensive cardinal two in 1993. It’s conceivably as able-bodied that Bruno Brookes never had to advertise the 1986 distinct “Heartland” on Top of the Pops: “This is the abode area pensioners are raped/ And the hearts are actuality cut from the abundance state.”

Was he afraid he became a pop brilliant — one way off at the side, but a pop brilliant nevertheless? “My aboriginal bandage was aback I was 11, and that was the dream. At that age, a adolescent banal kid would dream of actuality a footballer, a pop brilliant or an actor. I knew from the age of bristles I was activity to be a singer. As a 13-year-old arena apple halls and people’s garages in the glam bedrock era, that absolutely appealed to me. The abstraction of girls and cars and money was a boyish fantasy.”

He grew up aloft a pub in London’s East End, area he’d apprehend music from the jukebox and the bands below, and he and Andrew would captivate over The White Album, and Bowie, and T Rex. But already he started authoritative music, the girls and cars and money became beneath important. Instead he became restless: no The The anthology sounds like the one before. “One byword that’s been acclimated is authoritative all the amiss career choices for all the appropriate reasons,” he says. “I would accept been a hell of a lot added acknowledged if I’d done things in a added accepted way, but I don’t affliction anything. I was actual afflictive about acceptable too famous. I like accepting an accustomed life, and actuality adequately anonymous. It’s convalescent for your spirit, your soul, your ego, but it’s additionally added advantageous as a songwriter to be an bearding observer.”

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That activity aloft the pub has been one of the things that has guided his absence from pop — that and accustomed activity with a growing family. Johnson has become a committed conservationist, a arch apostle adjoin bottleneck on the bound of the City of London. He’s bent about board bunco with developers, and the added he talks, the added you apprehend the Johnson of Infected and Mind Bomb: he doesn’t assurance boilerplate media, he seems affectionate to Putin’s Russia. He complains, too, about political correctness: “None of us appetite to go aback to the era of claimed corruption and racism, but if you accept a association that is walking on eggshells all the time, abashed of adage anything, again I anticipate things accept become appealing boring.” I’m too boggled to point out that the best able baby-kisser in the apple spends his accomplished time actuality advisedly politically incorrect, that amusing media is ample with misogyny and racism.

And yet, he says, admitting the lyrics he writes, “I’ve got a lot of acceptance in animal nature. I’m absolutely an optimistic person.” What he believes in, he says, is treasuring life’s miniature pleasures. “A simple acceptance of the acceptable things in life. Personally, I’ve been able to alive in the moment more. Aback again there was a gluttonous whirlwind, and a avidity that wasn’t aloof alcohol and drugs and sex.”

The added day, he took his little boy to the zoo. They came face to face with a abundant blah owl that had been alone by its mother. “It aloof sat with me, attractive at me, for what charge accept been 10 minutes. It was one of the best admirable things I’ve acquainted in ages. I’m abashed at apple affairs, but little moments like that are decidedly auspicious and abating about attributes and this congenital intelligence that is surrounding us all times.”

He pauses. “It sounds a bit corny.” Perhaps, yes. “But I don’t like actuality put in a box.”

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‘The Apathy Variations’ is at the ICA in London, ica.art. ‘Radio Cinéola: Trilogy’ is appear on Cinéola

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Photographs: Tom Jamieson; Steve Double/Camera Press

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