Long Live The 1975
“You may not get the girl, but you’ve always got your boys,” Matty Healy wrote on Instagram
Long live The 1975. In the music video for the band’s all-consuming love song “Oh Caroline,” a deep cut from their fifth studio album Being Funny in a Foreign Language, a grand romance runs its course, but the four-piece’s adoration for one another endures without expiration.
The video pictures frontman Matty Healy as an old man, all gray hair attached to an aging body that doesn’t move like it used to, channeling the days of his youth in an empty ballroom. When he spins around, strumming his cane like a guitar, he’s transported back to his time on stage with his best mates guitarist Adam Hann, bassist Ross MacDonald, and drummer George Daniel.
It was there, in front of a neon sign reading “At Their Very Best,” that Healy encountered the co-author of his however-brief love story, twirling her throughout the room to the tune of his own song. As the video weaves in and out of the past and future, the singer’s great love disappears, and he’s left dancing all on his own. Still, he remembers all of the moves from the elaborate choreography they constructed together. In an alternate universe, this is how La La Land ended.
When she slips away for good, and he can’t return to the past, he settles for the comfort of his bandmates. On stage once again, in front of the same neon stage, Daniel’s drumstick lifts dust off of his set. They’re moving a bit slower, but they’ve still got it. In the end, they settle around a dining table for coffee and, for Healy, a cigarette. He still doesn’t like menthols.
“You may not get the girl,” the frontman wrote on Instagram. “But you’ve always got your boys.”