Gig review: The 1975 at First Direct Arena, Leeds

Bleary-eyed with a five o’clock shadow, Matty Healy is lounged on a sofa when the lights come up on The 1975 at Leeds’s First Direct Arena.

But lest uninitiated punters fear they are in for a rough night with one of the most idiosyncratic frontmen in the game, they needn’t worry; moments later, when he ambles to the piano, lights up a cigarette and begins crashing the keys, he already has them hypnotised in the palm of his hand.

The Cheshire art-pop-rocke rs ’ return to West Yorkshire just five months after they were parachuted in to salvage Reading and Leeds comes amid the peak of their terminally online notoriety; Healy, a singer-songwriter who beat heroin addiction to emerge as his generation’s most postmodern performer, has gone viral in recent months for his tour antics, from kissing fans to chowing down on raw meat.

His brand of braggadocio, toggled between amorality and debonair sincerity, is dialled up to eleven here – but then, for a show as theatrically deconstructive as this, it is only fitting.

Playing a new record in full is the sort of hubristic act reserved for the ego-heavy stadium star, and the decision to roll out last year’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language appears a gamble.

But upon a stage constructed like the cross-section of a suburban home, it comes together with unexpected potency; a Stop Making Sense-indebted piece of performance art.

Throughout, Healy plays the jaded rockstar on the verge of a breakdown to a tee; his swagger through the disco-hip Happiness gives way to him howling atop the roof of his house on I Like America and America Likes Me, before falling to his knees for the widescreen cinema of About You.

For those less patient, good things come to those who wait; after a hazy interval where their frontman crawls half-naked into a television set, the band return guns blazing for a near-unstoppable hits-only second half.

It is a cavalcade of burnished bangers; If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know), It's Not Living (If It's Not With You), Somebody Else, all stone-cold in their execution. The earnestness Healy and company have tamped down finally rises to the surface in this final stretch.

“This has been The 1975 at their very best!” he crows, as the floorfiller burst of The Sound rattles root canals all around. His words might just be close to the truth.