We have Jack Kerouac to thank for the band name The 1975. The band fronted by Matty Healy with lead guitarist Adam Hann, bassist Ross MacDonald and drummer George Daniel is slowly becoming a household name thanks to the success of such albums as I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It in 2016 and A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships in 2018. Their name is as famous as their songs, with their origins based on literature from one of America’s most famous authors.
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Meaning Behind the Band Name
The band that would become The 1975 was formed at Wilmslow High School in England in 2002 with original members Hann, MacDonald and Healy, the latter of whom was initially the drummer and later replaced by Daniel. The group went through a laundry list of names over the course of a decade: Drive Like I Do, Me and You Versus Them, Forever Drawing Six, Talkhouse, the Slowdown, and Bigsleep. They also operated as Those 1975s, which was shortened to The 1975 in 2012 after Healy stumbled upon a copy of Kerouac’s famous 1957 novel, On the Road.
The story of how they got the name is as poetic as the work itself. Healy was in Majorca, Spain, when he happened to pass a Spanish villa and quickly made friends with the owner. “He showed me around his house…full of original Beatles records, signed Elvis shit, a photo of him with [Jimi] Hendrix,” Healy recalled to The Guardian about the fated encounter. But a visit to the library made an unexpected impact on his career when the man gave him a pile of books to take home, one of which was a copy of On the Road.
“I found a page of scribblings,” Healy explains. “It wasn’t really disturbing or dark or anything… the important thing that stuck with me was that the page was dated 1st June. The 1975. At the time I just thought that the word ‘The’ preceding a date was a strong use of language. I never thought it would be something that would later come to be so important. When it came to naming the band, it was perfect.
“On the back page there were loads of suicidal messages and it was dated ’1st June, The 1975′. The use of the word ‘The’ preceding the date really stuck with me,” he added in an interview with Fame Magazine.
The 1975 has released five studio albums so far, the latest being Being Funny in a Foreign Language in 2022. All five have reached No. 1 on the UK Albums chart, with all but their first peaking inside the Top 10 on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. Among their hit singles in the U.S. are “Chocolate,” “Love Me,” “Somebody Else,” “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” and “Me & You Together Song.”
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