Tell me about growing up in Newcastle. I grew up on a cow farm in the middle of [north east England county] Northumberland. My mum and dad were both from Newcastle, and my dad had just finished [acting in British ‘80s comedy drama] Auf Wiedersehen Pet, which was massive—and because it was so political, and all about the subsidisation of industry and Thatcher’s Britain, that you walk round the north east with my dad now and he’s a hero up there. He was knocking around with Thin Lizzy and [Dire Straits’] Mark Knopfler! I wasn’t socially isolated as a kid but I was an only child—so there were a lot of video games, a lot of Michael Jackson videos, a lot of singing and dancing to myself and self-involvement. Did you like being by yourself? I’ve always liked being by myself. I grew to like it less when I was older. And then I convinced myself for a long time that I liked my own company, but I actually just quite liked being on drugs and didn’t really like my own company at all. Did you take drugs by yourself? Oh yeah. Oh yeah! Every pursuit of mine is very indulgent and personal. That sounds like a dark thing to say; my indulgences are always private things. I used to like thinking and writing on drugs. I thought I was William Burroughs, know what I mean? Anyway, when I was ten I moved to Manchester when my mum got a job on [British soap opera] Coronation Street. I spent my whole teenage years there—went to school there, met the guys when I was 14 and we’ve been in the same lineup ever since.

Can you talk me through what happened last year, when you deleted all your social media accounts and everyone thought The 1975 had split up? Did you think you’d split up too? Oh no. Oh, it was all very clever. It was very much for the fans. Like everything we do. One misconception that annoys me is that we have a marketing team. It’s me and it’s Jamie [Oborne, the band’s manager]. Always has been from day one. This thing that turned into a press stunt or a PR stunt—‘ooh, they’ve disappeared, they had all their people do this thing for them’—well that just came from me sat smoking in my flat. Everyone says things like ‘we need to make noise.’ That’s everyone’s favourite word: noise. We were talking about putting the new album out and making sure people knew, so I was thinking that desirability is more potent than obtaining something. I thought, I might just do it now. Turn off the internet. So we had ‘the removal,’ and everyone went fucking mental. And more noise happened. Was there another end game beyond just making noise? I mean obviously it seems like a bit of an elaborate prank but it was a way of playing with the internet. We weren’t being melodramatic; it was the best way to reinvent. It’s an extreme act, to play with your fans like that. I suppose religions would say it’s testing their faith, do you know what I mean? Giving them a hint of the idea of a life without The 1975. Why would you want to do that? Because I knew it would be the most effective way for people to express how they truly feel about us.

"All of my flaws and all the things that make me up are part of who I am. It’s about honesty and everything that encompasses: fragility, neuroses, getting it wrong. I stand for being an ambassador of that kind of honesty."