“This Is The Day” by The The

"This Is the Day" is a Matt Johnson song that first came out as a The The single on 2 September 1983, a month before the band's debut album Soul Mining arrived with its own version on board. On record it reached only 71 in the UK, but it's one of the loveliest things Johnson ever wrote.

It's a strange, lopsided singalong: synth-pop with its feet in a folk dance. Johnson sings and handles the keyboards and percussion, Andy Duncan drums, Wix squeezes out a wheezing accordion and Paul Boyle's fiddle skips around the melody, so the whole thing sounds like a village fete held under a grey, industrial sky. Johnson's voice, plain and a little rueful, keeps the sweetness from turning sugary. Paul Hardiman co-produced it with Johnson, recording and mixing it for Epic.

Johnson came back to it a decade later, re-recording it as "That Was the Day", the lead track on the 1993 Dis-Infected EP, which reached number 17 in the UK.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.