Illinois Entertainer February 2016 | Page 47

Continued from page 26 that I need for what I do,” he says. “Like stage clothes and the show itself – that’s all I’ve spent my money on lately. Its important to save money so that we can buy property, and not do the whole cliché thing of blowing it all. So we’ve been really careful.” Just wait until you see their meticulously-staged upcoming tour, he promises. Then you’ll understand where all that dough disappeared to. Another facet of the tour has become of paramount importance. Spinning off from his 24-hour absence from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, Healy – who swears he was “just having fun with that”- now pauses, mid-concert, to address all the kids carefully focusing their cellphone cameras on him instead of actually taking in the performance, first-person. “And I say to people, ‘I fear that if we have such a desire to document everything, we might miss what’s actually happening. And there’s no point in doing a show for 1,000 people if we’re all going to retrospectively experience it. So fuck everybody else – let’s have me and you and us for ten minutes, and let’s just fucking be here.’ I tell everybody to turn their cellphones off, and if I see one popping up, I tell ‘em to put it down. And the thing is, the room’s energy just changes. It becomes electric, and you remind them that that’s what it’s all about – that shared experience. That’s the whole potency of it.” When Healy stumbled acr