I went to Majorca when I was nineteen, and I befriended this artist who lived out there. He gave me loads of beat poetry, Kerouac literature and I found a suicide page in one of the books. It was dated the 1st of June The 1975. And that really stuck with me, the use of the word ‘the’ preceding a date and I never really thought about it until we came to naming the band and I was thinking of things I liked the sound of and that was it.

We didn’t like the name The Slowdown, nearly got sued when we were called The Big Sleep. When it came to changing the name, everyone acted like it was a bit of a big deal. But it wasn’t really a big deal because no one really knew who we were, and we just wanted to have a fresh start. It was January 2012 when we were in the studio as The 1975 for the first time.