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NPR Music: Tiny Desk Concerts
Tiny Desk Concerts from NPR's All Songs Considered features your favorite musicians performing at Bob Boilen's desk in the NPR Music office. This is the AUDIO only archive.Are you a fancy A/V nerd and need video? Visit our new Tiny Desk Concert video channel. Eye-popping video and all of the music you've come to expect.

The 1975: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published September 10, 2013 at 6:00 AM MDT
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As lead singer of the youthful Manchester band The 1975, Matthew Healy has cranked out a batch of enjoyably wiry songs, most notably the singles "Chocolate" and "Sex" — each of which has attracted more than a million YouTube plays. The group has been bubbling up, here and in the U.K., for the last year or two, as it's toured with Muse and released an album and four EPs full of brash-but-winsome, electronics-tinged pop-rock.

So The 1975 knows its way around bigness. But, when asked to strip his band's sound down to fit the intimate confines of the Tiny Desk, Healy didn't hesitate to transform both his songs and himself. Performing solo with a guitar — he even goes fully acoustic for his two hits — he's reborn as an earnest troubadour, while his songs now register as melancholy musings. They're remarkably sturdy in any form, as this bit of left-field sweetness amply demonstrates.

Set List

  • "Sex"

  • "Chocolate"

  • "Woman"

    • Credits

    Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Parker Miles Blohm, Denise DeBelius, Erica Yoon; photo by Hayley Bartels/NPR

    Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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    Stephen Thompson
    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
    See stories by Stephen Thompson
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