Power to the “People”

THE 1975’S ADAM HANN DISHES ON THE UK POP-MEISTERS’ “FIRST PROPER ROCK SONG” AND HIS “SECRET WEAPON,” AN EBMM JOHN PETRUCCI SIGNATURE MODEL

- Gregory Adams

IT’S HARD TO believe, but we have an undercooked breakfast to thank for the 1975’s most outwardly rock ’n’ roll concert moment to date. Just after starting their most recent Australian tour, the U.K. quartet announced via Twitter that they’d been forced to pull out of a festival appearance in Brisbane because singer/ guitarist Matt Healy had been hospitalized “following a bout of serious sickness.” Healy’s health had made headlines in the past, having previously overcome a heroin addiction, but lead guitarist Adam Hann is quick to point out to Guitar World that this time his bandmate was leveled by a case of food poisoning.

“Matt had some bad eggs, as he said; he got salmonella. I mean, there’s just no way he was going to be able to [perform that night].”

Paying homage to Kurt Cobain’s iconic wheelchair entrance when Nirvana headlined the Reading Festival in 1992, Healy cheekily made his return to the stage the next night in Sydney, dressed in a see-through hospital smock and dragging a steely IV pole behind him. Hann’s streetwear-style get-up was modest in comparison, but he complemented the frontman’s vibe by searing into the extremely sick, scum-coated three-note lead lick of “People” — the first, and certainly loudest single from the 1975’s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form. Healy then dropped to his knees during the protest song, calling for thousands of fans to “wake up” while addressing climate change and political apathy with a series of feral howls. Though mixing T. Rex swagger with black-eyeliner screamo is a hard pivot from the rest of the group’s pop world-palatable catalog, Hann reveals that those riot-ready riffs were ultimately too “ridiculous” to pass up.