Intimate photos of The 1975 rehearsing ‘At Their Very Best’

The 1975’s ​‘At Their Very Best’ isn’t just an are­na rock tour. Wrapped with­in a sprawl­ing two-storey house that screams both ​‘90s sit­com’ and ​‘Ten­nessee Williams play,’ the show is split into two acts. The first is a high con­cept med­i­ta­tion on the tor­tured artist trope, the rela­tion­ship between art and con­sumerism and the mod­ern mas­culin­i­ty cri­sis, in which front­man Mat­ty Healy eats raw steak and does top­less push-ups in front of a TV flash­ing images of Prince Andrew and misog­y­nist grifter Andrew Tate; the sec­ond a more tra­di­tion­al parade of hits. Drama­tis­ing the sub­ject mat­ter and self-aware­ness of their song­writ­ing, ​‘At Their Very Best’ first chal­lenges what a pop show should be – and then ful­fils the bar­gain. As Healy has announced to audi­ences from the stage: ​“Wel­come to the show about the show.”

Cen­tral to bring­ing all this to life is the award-win­ning light, stage and con­cep­tu­al design­er Tobias Rylan­der. A long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor of The 1975, Rylan­der worked close­ly with Healy from the begin­ning of the process.

“Mat­ty is very cre­ative in his think­ing with nev­er-end­ing inter­est­ing ideas,” Rylan­der tells Huck of how the con­cept came about. ​“He thinks ART when he cre­ates and is also a very tal­ent­ed actor. I vis­it­ed the band when they were record­ing their album and we spoke a lot about the the­atre and how they want­ed to encap­su­late that into their tour.”

Keen to bring the process of a record­ing stu­dio and rehears­ing songs to the stage, the band and Rylan­der first came up with the idea of a room that could trans­form – as with a the­atre pro­duc­tion – which then led to the idea of the house.

“We the­o­ret­i­cal­ly want­ed the set to be anyone’s house, due to the mono­chro­mat­ic nature of the design,” says Rylan­der. ​“We want­ed to make sure that any­one could take a pho­to from any­where in the audi­ence, and it would be a great shot. The goal was to cre­ate a strong visu­al iden­ti­ty for each song, so that each song was able to be recog­nised from a sin­gle photograph.

“The house and street lamp are inspired by the art­work for their pop­u­lar sin­gle ​‘Falling For You’ and each lyric book on the house’s book­shelf rep­re­sents each song on the set list,” he adds. 

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty was also at the fore­front of the design: ​“We want­ed to cre­ate as lit­tle land­fill as pos­si­ble. The house you see is mod­u­lar and it can there­fore ​‘put it back on the shelf’ once the tour is over.”

The result is one of the most ambi­tious and inno­v­a­tive set designs in recent mem­o­ry. It’s also birthed per­haps the most icon­ic house in gui­tar music his­to­ry since Amer­i­can Foot­bal­l’s 1999 debut album (the Mid­west­ern emo leg­ends will, inci­den­tal­ly, be join­ing The 1975 for their biggest-ever head­line show at Lon­don’s Fins­bury Park in July).

With songs sung from the roof lit by a sin­gle street lamp, a spi­ral stair­case lead­ing to nowhere, and the door­way light­ing up in homage to the neon rec­tan­gle used in pre­vi­ous 1975 art­work and tours, the set is used to full effect – both as a phys­i­cal space, and as an exten­sion of the band’s lore.

“This tour is a con­tin­u­al evo­lu­tion of the band and their cre­ativ­i­ty,” says Rylan­der. ​“Most shows nowa­days are full of big lights and LED screens, this was the com­plete oppo­site. We didn’t know whether peo­ple were going to like it or whether it would work. This tour is a cel­e­bra­tion of where the band start­ed to where they are now. We opt­ed for a more organ­ic, liv­ing and breath­ing set which pro­vid­ed me with the per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to hide the light­ing rather than show­case it.”

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