Why Taylor Swift’s rebound fling with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy is giving her fans pause

My friends and I used to say that there’s nothing more appealing than watching your crush do something well behind a physical barrier. It’s the barista behind the counter or the bartender behind the bar, the DJ behind the decks or the musician behind a mic stand or a drum kit, elevated on a stage.

They’re on display, self-involved, competently pulling shots of espresso, shaking cocktails hard or banging out a hit single while you watch from a safe remove. They’re not sitting across from you at a restaurant asking polite questions about your siblings. Sometimes you don’t want to feel seen — you just want to watch.

The 1975 frontman Matthew “Matty” Healy is eminently watchable. He wears skinny black suits with white dress shirts, swigs wine from a bottle onstage, runs his mouth and kisses eager fans at his shows. One of many, proliferating videos on TikTok shows him asking a girl at the front if she wants to swap shirts. She nods yes, he peels off his white designer button-up, she pulls her early-edition The 1975 T-shirt over her head (yes, he wants his own band tee), they keep eye contact as they throw the shirts to each other and the crowd melts down.

“He’s a rat, but we love him,” one fan told me.

All of this made Healy a prime rebound fling candidate for Taylor Swift, a woman in her 30s who recently exited a long-term, low-key relationship. “I miss sparkling,” she sings on the track “Bejeweled,” off her most recent album “Midnights,” and if there’s one thing that will make a girl sparkle, it’s catching the eye — and holding it — of an unsuitable musician with dark curls that refuse to behave.

Swift and Healy have all but confirmed this dalliance, with recent paparazzi shots showing them leaving Electric Lady Studios in New York City together on Monday night after a party she hosted there and apparently not a collaborative recording session — though that could come soon enough and all of this would be savvy, Swift-esque marketing for it.

The timeline of Swift and Healy’s connection, cobbled together from blind items, dropped onstage hints and blurry fan videos, dates to Taylor making a guest appearance at a The 1975 show in January, where she sang her hit single “Anti-Hero” live for the first time.

When her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn ended in March, the rumours started swirling. Cut to early May, when Healy flew 19 hours from his tour stop in the Philippines to Nashville to dance adoringly in the crowd at all three of Swift’s shows in the city, and perform a guest song onstage with opening act Phoebe Bridgers. The blurry pap shots of Swift and Healy in the back of a black SUV after midnight that night were like a first taste of catnip to the gossip-hungry hordes; by Thursday, Swift and Healy were out in the open, snapped walking hand in hand into New York restaurant Casa Cipriani for a double date with their shared producer Jack Antonoff and his fiancée, actor Margaret Qualley. By last weekend, Healy was dancing with Swift’s parents at her concert in Philadelphia.

But these two have a past. In 2014, Swift and Healy played a little public flirting game, wearing each other’s band T-shirts to show they were fans. Healy dropped on a radio show interview that they had “exchanged numbers.”

Two years later, in a profile for British music magazine Q, Healy was asked if he was afraid of losing himself in a relationship and he said yes, linking this to Swift. “If I had (properly) gone out with Taylor Swift the first thing I would’ve (thought was) ‘F—ing hell I am not being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.’” And added, “That’s also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing.” The outrage that met this was such that the journalist who interviewed Healy felt compelled to write an op-ed in the Guardian saying she did not think he was a misogynist.

“I do like hot girls,” Healy told the comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg when he appeared on her web series “Chicken Shop Date” last October. Over eight minutes of banter, Dimoldenberg delicately skewers Healy’s rock star predilections, including that one (“yeah, I know you like hot girls, that’s quite predictable I think”) along with his black and white, smoke-wafted music videos, his description of himself as a lifelong musical genius and his foiled attempts to end the interview with a kiss.

Clearly a born performer, Healy grew up in a showbiz house with TV star parents — his mother was on the seminal British soap “Coronation Street.” He formed The 1975 at age 13 with three school friends; apparently they named the band for a date written on the back of a Jack Kerouac book of poetry. He’s spoken about growing up in a “party house” and his later struggles with addiction, including heroin use and a stint in rehab.

Healy has opined provocatively on all manner of topics, mocking his critics, using photography and fan art of himself while refusing to give credit, and equating Muslim faith with Isis in tweets about his own rejection of religion — google “Matty Healy problematic Twitter thread” if you want to see more.

He has attempted to frame this behaviour as a challenge to cancel culture. “The problem with Gen Z is that they’ve set up this moral standard that they can’t even live up to,” Healy told NME last October. Adding, “But you will make mistakes, you will hurt people, you will do things that some people will perceive as rotten. It’s this standard that I’m trying to break down.”

Some of his most objectionable behaviour is from the past four months: he did a Nazi salute onstage while satirizing Kanye West’s antisemitic remarks in January, then days later imitated a Japanese accent on the bro-y podcast “The Adam Friedland Show,” and laughed along with the co-hosts as they imitated Inuit and Chinese accents while discussing the musician Ice Spice.

Disturbingly, he also talked about masturbating to “abuse porn” featuring Black women, minutes after Friedland and others had left his house. “I think it literally was Ghetto Gaggers on the TV, somebody just getting, like, brutalized,” he said. It’s all a big joke, except it’s not at all funny — or attractive.

“I never want to hear he is playing a character again,” wrote a poster on Reddit.

As talented, pretty, privileged people often do, Healy may have a line to a redemption arc. He said onstage in Adelaide on April 23, just as the Swift romance kindled: “The era of me being a f—ing a–hole is coming to an end. I’ve had enough. I perform all the time, and it’s my job and I love doing this, but I can’t perform off the stage anymore.” That’s another fantasy: the bad boy who wants to be a better man to win your approval.

The question is, how much is Swift buying into this fantasy? Is she still just the hopeless romantic she’s always painted herself to be in her songs?

Swifties are divided, variously confused about how serious this relationship is, glad to see her be adored out in the open after years with an ultraprivate person and dismayed she’s aligning herself with a person with questionable values.

Many are sure she’s been orchestrating this entire narrative. A noted mastermind, Swift has firmly taken control of her story at this powerful and hugely successful point in her career, in contrast to her early days at the mercy of media and labels and talk show hosts’ jokes.

She lets us see what she wants us to see and right now she’s giving us a vicarious affair with an unsuitable rock star who was too cool once but is trying hard now. Watching that thrilling, dangerous ride is often better from the sidelines — we know enough to not embark on it ourselves. We know what’s on the other side of it. Does she?

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