The 1975, a band whose members are no strangers to real-life carnage, recreated fictional scenes of horror from movies at their Halloween concert at a venue with the comically unscary name of the Little Caesars Arena (horror! horror!) in Detroit. Their “Halloween Party,” according to NME, included callbacks to American Psycho, The Ring, and The Blair Witch Project.
Some of the horrors began after the band performed “About You.” Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip to Be Square” came over the PA, and singer Matty Healy was seen dressing like Patrick Bateman, American Psycho’s murderous finance bro who could lecture at length on the virtues of Huey Lewis. (Healy even handed out Patrick Bateman business cards, which, if you’ve seen the movie, you know are of a very high quality.)
Then Healy, still dressed in a Bateman-esque suit, was onstage watching a wall of nine TVs showing analogue white noise when the music dropped to a bass tone. He fell over in fright when someone wearing a wet-mop wig crawled out from one of them, like the iconic scene in The Ring. The audience screamed in both horror and delight. He treated fans to an acoustic solo performance of “Be My Mistake” after that.
Elsewhere in the set, Healy filmed a Blair Witch—like video diary in which he sent apologies to his mum and the other band members’ mums (but not guitarist Adam Mann’s). Then somebody turned on the light in the room where he was sitting, and he stood up fast. Apparently, he’d been Pooh Bearing it, and the sight of his butt inspired more screams in the audience.
The other members of the group got into the spirit of the holiday, too. Bassist Ross MacDonald dressed as the wrestler the Undertaker, Mann dressed as Eleven from Stranger Things, saxophonist-keyboardist John Waugh dressed as Heath Ledger’s Joker, and drummer George Daniel went full Hannibal Lecter. Despite the 1975’s habit of consuming raw meat onstage, Daniel did not consume any human liver with a fine chianti.
The scariest moment of the night, though, was when Healy shoved a microphone in the skull of an onstage skeleton, and it started singing Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” and Maroon 5’s “Payphone.” Healy apologized.
