Matty Healy

Oh Matty, Matty, Matty. Matty Healy is the lead singer of the indie rock band the 1975, to which everyone who is anyone is listening to at the moment. They're flawless, their music is raw, liquid gold and I have been loving them since about November/October, ever since I discovered Chocolate. I downloaded a few other 'popular' songs of theirs and then I got addicted and now boom! I'm obsessed.

Matty really pulls the band together, but he wouldn't really make it out on his own. He writes all the lyrics to the songs, and yes, he does get occasionally high, which explains why some lyrics make -0.78% sense. Nevertheless, he is absolutely gorgeous as he whips his thick, dark locks in front of the 1975 logo at his gigs as his little pale hands brush the expensive guitar strings for 'Girls'. He drinks a lot, and is tired a lot, but it all adds up to his tired, Doc Marten-wearing, ripped jeans image. His black leather jackets killed me- and after my beloved green one was unfortunately stolen, I went out and bought a black leather one, which I cannot- cannot - live without. 

One of my favourite things about Matty is his interviews- especially the way he talks. It's not just some junkie, tired and run down rubbish no one can understand- no, Matty talks like a wise man, the way he phrases his sentences, bases his experiences on the band and puts it all into perspective. He doesn't lie, when a journalist asked him how the singles first came out, he replied, 'We had nothing. All we had was a laptop, and my bedroom. We got our shit together, we started releasing records. We had nothing, we stole everything else.' I think that's something really admirable. It's not necessary to go out and steal things, obviously, but if you really want it, and think you can get it, then go for it. 

My favourite songs include Chocolate (obvs), Girls, Settle Down, 102, HNSCC, Head.Cars.Bending, She Way Out, Sex, Menswear, You and The City.

Matty gets often asked of how the band name came along. He always explains how when he was 17, he got given some poetry notebooks and a diary of a mad, suicidal man, who dated his entries with the year 'the 1975'. This caught Matty's attention, and well, the rest is history. I think it's amazing you still have some genuinely creative people left, and not wannabe personalities. Matty was already reading poetry books at 17, writing his own lyrics. As of today, his band is 10 years old, and Matty is only 24. Truth be told, they didn't graft tirelessly for those 10 years, he says they only 'got our shit together and started making records' recently. Creative talent shines through so early, and I think it's amazing Matty has been doing his own thing his entire life, even during the tender years of teenagehood.

Their best-known song, Chocolate, is a love letter to the police is Manchester. Matty may have 300 non- stop gigs this year, but he was a rebellious, carefree teenager who made fun of the cops as they 'had nothing better to do but chase us down for smoking'. This rebellious side of his reflects in his songs, and his fans mean the world to him- and he definitely means the world to us, too.

Thank you so much for reading!

Shoutout to my best babe Siobhan <3

My Twitter- @gabysayshey

Gaby x

Bel Air

Today, I want to share with you another one of my written 'short stories'- and this one was inspired by a dream I had, late February last year, that motivated me to deal with problems I had at the time. It motivated me, and pushed me- but I wrote this a month or so ago, for school, originally. I decided to put it on here as well, just to let you guys know what I do in my spare time. Hope you like! 

My Twitter- @gabysayshey

Bel air

‘Back in my Bel Air days, before I got married and left the States, I underwent a lot of pressure, stress and anxiety in my everyday life, due to general unorginasation and craziness. I would strut to meetings in high heels during the weekdays and spend the weekends in dark and hazy bohemian bars, with new beautiful friends every week, in flourishes of peroxide and cologne. By the time the end of the month approached, the city fumes and the hot sweat, compiled with my never-ending headaches, eventually got the better of me, and one weekend, I threw myself into a random train, an overnight bag beside me, and let it bring me anywhere, and I luckily discovered the loneliest part of Bel Air.

I came across it by accident, and returned to it once every few months, to clear my head, inhale the fresh cold air, right up until we moved.

The train would drop me off and I would hire a bright red 97’ Chevrolet at the station- similar to my very own one- and drive until I found it. This consisted of 2-3 hours of darting around the town, zig-zagging, turning and driving monotonously to and fro, until the place would appear, until the little gravel road would find me.

In all simplesness, it was really just an abandoned large cottage in the middle of a field of crisp grass, surrounded by a few bare young deciduous trees, standing lonely around the cottage, like they were keeping the house’s company, reassuring its loneliness.

By the time I would find that secluded area, peripheral from the rest of Bel Air, sheltered and hidden, the sunset would be hitting that point where it just gets unmistakably gorgeous: a bright, deep, crimson sun with orange cirrus clouds accompanying it, as if protecting it from harmful eyes. Flakes of orange were woven in-between the clouds, shades of yellow were flaked into the white light, like something out of a Technicolor 1970’s movie. Stars had just begun to show, desperate to get a peek of the extraordinary sight, peeping in, always from the left side of the sky, bringing darkness and a full cold moon with them.

Even though night time would be fast approaching, as the heat cooled and temperature fell, the birds awakened, became alive, and a mockingjay’s song was always very clear and shrill, but I could never spot any mockingjays themselves. Starlings and sparrows treated the colourful sky like a playground:  they darted in and out of the clouds, formed clusters and geometrical shapes, flapping their dark wings excitedly, chattering amongst themselves as darkness fell.

The sky was busy, but so was the ground, the field that held the lonely cottage. Long, uncut blades of grass brushed and tingled my sins as I strode through them, and the bed of greenery was a home to wild field flowers; sunshine coloured daffodils, the biggest petals I had ever seen. The green sea also held daisies, not tiny little flowers, no, large proper heads of daisies on which you could predict your love life on- ‘he loves me, he loves me not…’. The flowers had the most wonderful scents- sweet, delicate aromas that washed over you, combined with the fresh smell of grass and freedom, relaxed my tensions. I used to wish it could’ve been possible for me to somehow store all of the scents in a flask, and bring it back to the city, to use as a tool for releasing any anxieties whenever I wished, but unfortunately it wasn't to be.

Bare trees complemented the cottage, with their stiff, thick, rugged bark and thin branches that made a ‘snap!’ when broken. Thick low clouds seemed imprisoned in those branches, thick pink candyfloss clouds, dense with precipitation.

Dirty, beige paint chipped off the walls of the house, and cherry trees stood tall, mighty and proud, in all of their glory, at the back of the house, in what would've been the garden. They always had cherries that weighed down the branches- ripe sparkling fruit on green stems, but I discovered that around 1 in a dozen cherries, there was only one sweet and sickly- the other eleven lying sisters were sour like lemons. Regardless, I always kept coming back for more, picking and tasting until I hit the jackpot.

That field, those daisies and starlings and dusty windows were my home in a foreign land, my own private piece of paradise, here for me whenever I wished. The place had a taste of mystery around it- whose house was it, who had lived here, why had they left? I never researched, and I never really cared, all I knew was that Heaven was available, exclusively to me, whenever I wished to visit.’

Thanks for reading!

Gaby x