Matty Healy Covers The La’s For Charity, Gifts TV To Uber Driver, Rescues Motorist With Dead Battery

You could look at this post in one of a few ways. Maybe the 1975 frontman Matty Healy is fucking around with sidequests instead of getting back to making music with his band. Or maybe he's gearing up to release more music with the 1975, so he's doing more stuff that'll put him in the public eye. And here's yet another possibility: He's just living his life, and some of the things that he does will inevitably end up on music blogs like this you. You decide!

In any case, the Sunday For Sammy benefit, a biennial fundraiser for young performers in the area, happened on Sunday in the UK city of Newcastle. Matty Healy's father Tim is the chairman of the Sunday For Sammy Trust. Matty has played the benefit before, and he put in a surprise appearance last night. In afternoon and evening performances, he played a four-song acoustic set that included covers of the La's' "There She Goes" and James Taylor's "Carolina In My Mind." Newcastle's own Sting also made a surprise appearance as a speaker.

Matty Healy previously included "There She Goes" on a 2020 Apple Music playlist of songs that influenced him, but he'd never covered it before last night. He did cover "Carolina In My Mind" on TikTok last fall, with Tiny Habits, a couple of months after his fiancée Gabbriette surprised him with tickets to a Taylor show. Earlier this month, coincidentally enough, James Taylor told Stephen Colbert that "Carolina" was one of his five best songs. (The others were "Mean Old Man," "Millworker," "The Frozen Man," and "Sweet Baby James.")

During his solo set, Matty Healy also played "It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)" and "About You," two 1975 songs that he'd apparently never done solo before. Watch some videos below.

Healy's performance came after a week of Healy taking over comedian Dax Flame's Instagram as part of an ongoing bit.

In one of those videos, Healy awkwardly gifts a free TV to an Uber driver. It's not very satisfying. I guess that's the joke.

A few weeks ago Healy went viral when he and an unknown man helped jumpstart somebody's car. The driver went viral with a TikTok about it. (The driver's sister also posted the family group chat screengrab about the incident.)

This probably wasn't a publicity stunt. It was probably just a famous person doing a normal, helpful thing. The annoying thing about being alive in 2026 — one of the annoying things about being alive in 2026 — is that you can never truly know.

A new 1975 album is expected this year, when Healy is done pursuing charitable sidequests and playing Arc Raiders. “I have been living in the studio and not sleeping much (happens I think normally one month a year) and after work playing Arc Raiders almost religiously,” he wrote on the band’s Subreddit last week. “I’ve never had a game that’s part of my life like an album or something it has become something I take quite seriously. Would be cool to play with you guys - any suggestions of how to do it without doxing my gamer tag and just blowing my shit up?“