The The’s “This Is The Day” was a central part of the soundtrack to my first year at University. The man behind it, Matt Johnson, singing of new beginnings, but with some regret, some nervousness at letting go of the past. It definitely fit. Plus the song’s opening line, “You didn’t get up this morning because you didn’t go to bed” was also ringing true. 

One of my best friends, when we met as freshers, his music “collection” consisted of two cassette singles, and “This Is The Day” was one of them (1). He’d get stoned, lie back and listen to it, over and over, on his worse for wear Walkman. The night before his finals he also played it on loop, during a desperate last minute, speed-driven revision session. So for us, as a gang, the song has entered into folklore.  

I’m sure that it holds stories and memories for millions of people, since it magically allows everyone to project their own experience on to it: meeting / leaving partners, landing / losing jobs, moving / returning. 

Its lyrics also take on new meaning with time. Swedish musician, Thomas Feiner, illustrated this, with his own terrific take, recorded for The The’s 2017 Radio Cineola project. Slowing the song right down, the main melody now carried by a muted jazz horn, and set to clanking percussion, like an around midnight clock ticking. Its shuffle beaten, broken but not quite spent. Its protagonist 40 years older, lonely, lost in yesterdays not tomorrows. A finale of dancing guitar, thankfully, suggesting a hint of hope, undefeated yet. 

Manic Street Preachers also tapped into this nostalgic mix of joy and melancholy. Their version is powered by the band’s trademark Clash-inspired rock riffing, and turned into a stadium anthem. However, the accompanying video is a poignant montage of the group’s career, a celebration made bitter sweet by the clips of Richie “James” Edwards. 

Badly Drawn Boy’s solo acoustic reading features fine fretwork and gives the internal voice a real sense of someone struggling against the odds with self-destructive habits, the addict, the alcoholic, explaining why the song lends itself so readily to films such as last year’s Saoirse Ronan-starring The Outrun. That said you can catch snatches of “This Is The Day” in a vast range of contrasting “media”, from Sex Education to Swallow, to Guardians Of The Galaxy. 

I was lucky enough to talk to Matt a few weeks ago, specifically about how “This Is The Day” was written and recorded. The main part of the interview has been published in this month’s issue of Electronic Sound. However, there was a lot of interesting stuff that the word count wouldn’t let us include, about the covers and countless TV and movie placements, which I’ll present here now. 

Text taken from Matt Johnson in Conversation.

I wrote “This Is The Day” on a small Japanese instrument, made by Suzuki, called The Omnichord. I started using an Omnichord when I was in New York with Mike Thorne. I’d been in New York re-recording two of my songs, which would become “Perfect” and “Uncertain Smile”. Mike was Soft Cell’s producer, and Wire’s producer. Wire were a band that I was quite influenced by, and quite involved with – my roots were in the post-punk world – so there was a connection.

Mike had bought a Synclavier, which was an incredible instrument for its time, and it was even more expensive than the Fairlight, which costs thousands and thousands of pounds. I think the Synclavier was the price of a medium sized house. Out of the reach of most musicians. Mike had bought this machine, but what was a bit cheeky was that, Mike, whether you liked it or not, he would use it on all of his productions, and the bands would then have to pay for renting it. So I was like, “Well, I don’t really want to use the Synclavier, and I want to use The Omnichord”, and he wasn’t happy about it. Ironically, these days The Omnicord is still being used, whereas the Synclavier is just a museum piece. 

What I liked about the Omnicord is that’s very easy to use. I was a big fan of the band Suicide, who only had a cheap organ, something like a Farsifa and a drum machine. I liked the haunting quality, and The Omnichord provided that. It has built-in sounds and built-in a drum machine. You can’t really program it. These days, digitally, the available parameters and options now are just completely overwhelming. I’m a big believer in that it’s easier to create when you’ve got limitations.

On the version of the song that we did for the album, “Soul Mining”, we ended up removing most of the Omnichord, and it ended up going in quite a different direction. Then, when we were doing our second world tour, “The Lonely Planet Tour,” in support of the album, “Dusk”, I decided that I wanted to strip the song back, live, to just the Omnichord again. So my keyboard player, DC Collard would sit with the Omnichord on his on his lap. We had a harmonica player at the time, Gentleman Jim Fitting, who played harmonica where we would have had the accordion parts, and I liked it so much that I thought, “You know what, let’s record this”, and we ended up putting it out as a single. 

I like covering my own songs. Funnily enough, there’s a new single that we’ve got coming out, which is a version of “Slow Motion Replay”, which was also all done on the Omnichord. A couple of years ago I did a song called, “I Want 2 B U”, which is part of the soundtrack for one of my brother’s films, “Muscle”, and again that was all done on the Omnichord. So I do like that instrument. I’ve got about 5 of them now, but I always go back to the original one. The one I bought when I was 20. 

In 2017, for the Radio Cineola project, I asked friends to pick a song of mine to cover and Thomas Feiner chose “This Is The Day”. I was absolutely blown away by his version. He slowed it right down, changed the instrumentation, and he’s got a great voice. 

Badly Drawn Boy did a version. Manic Street Preachers as well. Plus a few other people. I’m always happy for people to cover my songs. I love it. Just grab it and take it. I’ve covered other people’s songs, like Hank Williams, Fred Neil and Duke Ellington. I think it’s fine as long as you have fun with the song, and take it in a new direction and experiment. I’m always happy to hear what other people do with my songs.

As far as TV, ads and films are concerned, I get control over what the song gets used for, and occasionally we’ll turn down usage, but generally, we say “Yes”. Something like “Guardians Of The Galaxy”, for instance, has such a huge audience that it brings the song to new generations, which is what I like. It’s a very different industry we’re in now to what we were. Radio is less influential, physical sales are down, so you have to diversify as an artist. You have to be open to to different ways of reaching an audience. We get approached at least once a month for it to be used in films and adverts. It seems to be a bit self-perpetuating. Recently one of my other songs got a look in. “Lonely Planet” was in Francis Ford Coppola’s new film, “Megalopolis”.

While “This Is The Day” is shot through with melancholy and poignancy, it still has this sense of hope, and I think that’s why the song has proven to be popular. That’s life itself, you know. Life isn’t all good or all bad. It’s it’s a combination of things that we that we carry with us. 

That’s something I try to do in a lot of my songs – like “Perfect”, and “The Beat(en) Generation” – to sugar the pill. So the lyrics are quite reflective or political, while the music is upbeat. If people are singing along, then it’s only afterwards that they possibly think about what they’ve singing along to.

(Sadly, lyrically this could have been written yesterday, not 35 years ago).

The rest of this interview can be found in Issue 126 of Electronic Sound. 

The The’s new single, “Slow Emotion Replayed”, is available to preorder, and the band are currently on tour:

09 June – Mejeriet, Lund, Sweden  SOLD OUT
10 June – Pustervik, Gothenburg, Sweden
12 June – Bergenfest Festival, Bergen, Norway
14 June – Heartland Festival, Kværndrup, Denmark
16 June – Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany  SOLD OUT
18 June – OLT Riverenhof, Antwerp, Belgium
19 June – Muziekgebouw, Eindhoven, Netherlands
20 June – TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht, Netherlands
22 June – Forever Now Festival, Milton Keynes, England
23 June – Cliffs Pavilion, Southend-on-Sea, England
25 June – den Atelier, Luxembourg-City, Luxembourg
26 June – Bataclan, Paris, France  SOLD OUT
28 June – Tener-A-Mente Festival – Anfiteatro del Vittoriale, Gardone Riviera, Italy
29 June – X-tra, Zurich, Switzerland
30 June – Open Air Arena, Vienna, Austria
02 July – Circus Krone, Munich, Germany
03 July – Batschkapp, Frankfurt, Germany

Venues and ticket links can be found HERE.

NOTES

(1) The other was Alphaville’s Big In Japan. 

(2) I couldn’t actually find that many recorded covers. Ten-piece, Italian ska band, The Orobians did a take. As did Californian band, Missing Persons. The latter is synth-pop, but less The The’s Some Bizzare label mates Soft Cell, and more Wang Chung, something from an `80s John Hughes movie. The singer, Dale Bozzio, was a former Playboy bunny.