Who Is Matty Healy? What to Know About Taylor Swift's Rumored Boyfriend
Singer and guitarist Matt Healy has been making steadily bigger and bigger headlines for the last few years, but his recent on-stage appearance with with Taylor Swift is clearly a quantum leap forward. Healy is 34 years old and is the frontman of The 1975, a pop rock band from England that first formed in 2002. For those catching up, here's what you need to know about Healy – and why Swifties have their eye on him.
Healy was a founding member of The 1975 along with guitarist Adam Hann, Bassist Ross MacDonald and Drummer George Daniel. All were in high school at the time in Manchester, England, but the ensemble survived into true pop stardom. Healy has sparked some serious controversy with his public commentary over the years, and more recently for his bizarre antics on stage. Healy has a well-documented history with drug addiction, so when his behavior makes headlines his fans often fear a relapse.
Of course, the reason Healy is trending right now is because many fans are speculating that his relationship with Swift is more than professional. Some have also wondered if there is something going on between him and fellow singer Phoebe Bridgers. While there is little to report on these rumors conclusively, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to go over. Here's a quick briefing on Matt Healy.
Childhood
Healy's parents are both actors – Tim Healy and Denise Welch – so the singer grew up relatively wealthy and attended private school. In 2020 he told The Times that he was kicked out of his private school for starting a fight, which is how he ended up at Wilmslow High School where he met his bandmates. Healy dropped out of music college as well to pursue a career in the industry right away.
prevnextCareer
The 1975 took off in 2013 with the release of their first studio album, which was self-titled. The band now has five studio albums including 2022's Being Funny in a Foreign Language, which they toured on last year. Meanwhile, Healy has dabbled in a solo career including production and one prominent solo performance in 2021.
From the beginning, Healy garnered a reputation for outrageous stunts on stage, including kissing fans, mocking the audience, mocking venue staff and once eating raw meat in front of a crowd. At the same time, he has often used his time on stage to make blunt social commentary. He has voiced support for the Black Lives Matter movement and for stricter gun control laws in the U.S.
prevnextAddiction
In 2017, Healy's bandmates paid to send him to a drug rehabilitation facility in Barbados to treat him for addiction to heroin and benzodiazepines. He described his time there in an interview with Rolling Stone, including the preliminary work he did on new songs there. According to a report by The New Zealand Herald, Healy still smokes cigarettes and drinks on stage, but claims to abstain from drugs.
prevnextControversial Comments
Healy was heavily criticized for an interview in February of 2023 on The Adam Friedland Show podcast where he cracked some questionable jokes and made some incendiary comments about pop culture. He leveled insults at Harry Styles, Pink and Ice Spice while imitating various ethnic accents, among other things. The podcast caused so much uproar that it was eventually removed from the Apple Podcasts app and Spotify. This wasn't the first time Healy got himself into hot water with his blunt sense of humor – and it's not the instance that Taylor Swift fans are most concerned with.
prevnextRumors about Swift
In 2015 Swift attended one of The 1975's concerts and spent time with Healy and his bandmates backstage. This sparked rumors that Swift and Healy might be dating, which Healy denied in a 2016 interview with The Guardian. However, Healy's commentary about this rumor led him into even deeper trouble.
Healy said that he imagined dating Taylor Swift would be a "de-masculating, emasculating thing." In that context, the comments were read as misogynistic and rude, but the interviewer published a follow-up article defending Healy and saying that this remark couldn't be viewed on its own. She wrote: "I saw an intelligent and liberal man wrestling with our culture's gender roles."
Later that same year Healy did another interview with The Guardian where he apologized for the comment and how it had been misread. he said that he was speaking about himself specifically, imagining that if he and Swift dated his self-image would suffer because he wants to attain her level of success as a pop star so badly. He said that in a relationship with Swift he would feel like he was second best.
In that same interview, Healy added new details to the rumors of his tryst with Swift. He said: "She came to a show and we hung out. We fancied each other, but then we couldn't have it go any further, because it would be like going out with Barack Obama."
prevnext'Eras' Tour
Since then, Healy and The 1975 have worked with Swift professionally on her album Midnights and other projects. They continue to be friends as well as colleagues, and subsequent speculation about Swift and Healy dating got little coverage until last week, when Swift's Eras Tour passed through Nashville, Tennessee. Healy was in the crowd on the first night, photographed prominently as he danced and sang along. The following night, Healy joined Phoebe Bridgers and Swift on stage.
prevnextNew Dating Rumor
Taylor Swift and Matty Healy seen arriving to her Nashville condo in new photos obtained by Daily Mail. pic.twitter.com/K82TASQ5T6
— Pop Base (@PopBase) May 7, 2023
Finally, the latest rumor that Swift and Healy are in fact dating broke through on Sunday when The Daily Mail published alleged photos of them together in a car heading to Swift's condo. At the same time, a source told The Sun that the two are "madly in love," adding: "It's super-early days, but it feels right. They first dated, very briefly, almost ten years ago but timings just didn't work out."
"Both Matty and Taylor have been touring over the past few weeks, so it's been a lot of Face-Timing and texting but she cannot wait to see him again," the source went on, saying that the two singers "are incredibly supportive of their respective careers." So far, Swift and Healy haven't commented on these rumors, and neither is very active on social media.
prev