‘This Is The Day’: How The The made a post-punk classic
Evoking images of summer sunrises and redbrick buildings, ‘This Is The Day’ successfully captured the optimism of the post-punk period – the idea of a new dawn rising upon the music industry. The The are far too often omitted from conversations surrounding the early post-punk scene, but ‘This Is The Day’ is an undeniable classic of the era.
Forming in 1979, at the peak of England’s post-punk scene, The The were heavily influenced by the experimental and avant-garde sounds of Throbbing Gristle but with sensibilities closer to pop and the old-school psychedelia of Syd Barrett. The resulting sound was something unlike anything else being released at the time: daring, experimental, yet palatable and capable of achieving mainstream success.
The brainchild of the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Matt Johnson, The The were incredibly ahead of their time. This fact was accentuated by the release of ‘This Is The Day’, arguably the group’s defining track. Upon its initial release in the summer of 1983, the single reached a fairly lacklustre 71 in the UK charts, while the album it was taken from, Soul Mining, reached only 23 in the album charts. However, upon the re-recording and re-release of the single in 1993, ‘This Was the Day’ rocketed to 17 in the charts, a testament to the visionary songwriting of Johnson.
There is a certain optimism to the song, beholding the kind of sound that would later characterise the 1990s Britpop boom. Explaining the motives behind the song’s mood, Johnson told Dazed back in 2018, “I was probably quite happy, because I was in a new relationship with Fiona [Skinner], so I was in love,” he said, continuing, “When you’re in a very new relationship, there’s a certain insecurity before the relationship has settled down. […] So there’s all that adolescent, late adolescent, post-adolescent insecurity.”
Aside from that sense of youthful excitement and insecurity, the track was also reportedly influenced by Johnson’s own youth, which was plagued by anxiety and melancholy. “In my mid-teen years until my late teen years, I was a bit melancholic,” the singer explained. “I’ve always been quite a restless, anxious person. There’s a little insecurity that things are actually really good at the moment, so what’s about to go wrong? Elements of self-sabotage were probably going through my mind at the time.”
This darker influence of self-sabotage and self-loathing comes from the real-life experiences of Johnson, who recalled, “I’ve known a few people over the years who’ve committed suicide out of the blue. You’re horrified and deeply saddened, and have no idea what they were going through, because you would think they had everything going for them.”
This feeling of confusion and deep melancholy is contrasted in the song with a sense of youthful wonder, which the singer attributed to his childhood curiosity, “I remember when I was a little boy I hated school and I would daydream, looking out of the window,” he said, “If it was a clear blue sky there was this sense of faith in the future, and optimism. You see a plane going by and you think, ‘One day I’m going to be on that plane, going abroad.’”
Thankfully, the success of the song, and the Soul Mining album in general, did allow Johnson to realise his boyhood fantasy of travelling abroad. The legacy of the iconic track is vast and long-lasting, with it witnessing something of a resurgence in recent years after being featured on the soundtrack to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3.
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