Sometimes you’ve got to shock your audience to move your sound forward, and that’s exactly what The 1975 did with People, as guitarist Adam Hann engineered the most hostile electric guitar tone that he had ever committed to tape, and applied all that skronk to three minutes of garage glam-rock anarchy.
As the first single plucked from their fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form, People was a statement of intent. It was something different.
But those who had been paying attention might have recognized Hann’s tone. He had used something similar on Give Yourself a Try, from A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships (2018).
But context matters. All that wiry treble made more sense with frontman Matt Healy spitting venom into the mic. After all, a protest anthem sometimes needs the whiff of cordite to get the audience going, to give them a jolt.
Speaking to Guitar World in 2020, Hann admitted that not everyone likes it. But that’s what makes it so effective. To recreate this at home, you will need an Audio Kitchen Little Chopper tube amp head, which can be a real powerhouse in the studio. This was dimed. But then Hann stuck a Thermionic Culture: Culture Vulture rack-mounted tube-driven distortion unit on the mic channel. Boom! That was the secret sauce.
“We put this valve distortion unit across the mic channel, and that gives it this super-dry, ear-piercing quality that I’m sure many people are not too fond of,” he said. “When [People] came out, going by the comments on our social media, people were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
This was the new sound of The 1975, or at least an audacious new side to them, all sharp edges. People wasn’t a track for pop hooks. The subject matter – climate change, apathy, the gathering storm of our polycrisis moment – did not lend itself to hooks.
The main riff in the chorus of People, that’s one of those jokey heavy riffs you play for fun, you know?
But there is a groove that's hard to quit. Where much of Notes on a Conditional Form came together during their touring cycle, Hann took some of that forward motion and kept tweaking as they went along. People is deadly serious but they are having some fun with the glam-rock stomp.
“The main riff in the chorus of People, that’s one of those jokey heavy riffs you play for fun, you know?” said Hann. The more they played around with it during soundcheck, the more credible it got, and what started as a bit of fun turned out as the album’s lead single and The 1975’s “first proper rock song”.
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