Divisive Taylor Swift Remarks Matt Healy Made Clearly Buried After 1975 Gig

The 1975's Thursday evening show in London, England, featured a very special surprise guest in the form of Taylor Swift.

The singer wowed the audience by taking to the stage at the O2 Arena, where she performed the lead single from her Midnights album, "Anti-Hero", for the first time.

In November 2022, the 1975's frontman Matty Healy confirmed that the band, who are currently touring, had collaborated with Swift on Midnights, but that their work together never made the final cut.

Swift's surprise appearance, which also included a cover of the 1975's "The City," has delighted lots of fans, and it would seem comments that Healy previously made about the singer now belong to the past.

Newsweek has everything you need to know about what the 1975 singer Matt Healy said about Taylor Swift.

What Did Matt Healy Say About Taylor Swift in 2016?

In 2016, Healy took part in an interview with journalist Laura Barton for Q Magazine, where the pair discussed how he and Swift had been romantically linked in the press.

Healy then received some criticism for his comments about not wanting to date Swift, with some calling his remarks "misogynistic."

This led Barton to write an article for The Guardian about her experience interviewing Healy, where she defended the singer and denied he was being misogynistic.

Barton wrote that Healy and Swift had been briefly linked in 2014, when the pair were both 25, and that they spoke about Swift in their interview "in the context of the difficulty of dating in the limelight."

"It's not really anything to talk about, because if she wasn't Taylor Swift we wouldn't be talking about her," she reported Healy as saying. "She wasn't a big impact on my life. It's just interesting to me how interested the world is about Taylor Swift."

Healy, per Barton, then said: "I feel like I'm not very good at relationships," and when asked if the reason for this was "a fear of losing himself," Healy is said to have nodded, before saying: "Absolutely. And the reason I mention that is because if I had [properly] gone out with Taylor Swift the first thing I would've [thought was] 'F****** hell I am NOT being Taylor Swift's boyfriend.' You know, F***. THAT."

"That's also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing," he then added, as "an afterthought."

Have Taylor Swift and Matt Healy Dated?

The short answer is: No, Swift and Healy never dated.

After the backlash to his comments in Q Magazine, Healy reportedly took to Twitter to clarify what he had said about the singer in a lengthy series of posts.

The tweets he posted have since been deleted but an Elle article from 2016 reported that the star said: "Now I may admit to being an idiot on occasion, but I am not a misogynist. This suggestion makes me really sad."

Healy is then said to have confirmed that he and Swift never dated, with his next tweet reading: "I was for a very short time immersed in a celebrity world that I found confusing and scary. At that time, I had fears of being 'somebody's boyfriend' (remember this is all speculation as we never dated!) before even being recognized for my music or presence as a person in my own right."

Healy then continued: "Now I don't pride myself on being more intelligent, or worldly, or wise, or progressive, or even regressive than the next man but I DO pride self on being honest. I was being HONEST about all the thoughts, feelings, and situations that come along when people ASSUME you are dating the most famous woman on the planet. I am telling you from experience it's an all-consuming whirlwind and something that for me elicited a lot of self-exploration."

"Now if you want to talk about Taylor Swift, that is easy.... Since she came to my show in December of 2014, I would say that 90 perfect of journalists that have interviewed me have asked about either her as a person or what our 'interaction' was like. I have said on countless occasions that I found her to be one of the most gracious, hard working, creatively gifted, and beautiful women that I have had the pleasure to meet. I personally have a lot of respect and admiration for her. Why would I not?" he added.

Healy then concluded his posts, per Elle, by saying: "I didn't even date Taylor, but the media's incessant and brutal obsession with her has meant that even a guy who DIDN'T DATE HER has been so battered by their never-ending questions that he's inevitably said something that can be lifted and molded into something that resembles 'shade.' It's really sad."

Newsweek has contacted Healy's representatives for comment.

Healy's last public relationship was with FKA Twigs. They split up in June 2022. Swift has been in a relationship with actor Joe Alwyn since 2016.