Bob Vylan defends Glastonbury IDF chant: “I’d do it again tomorrow”
Bob Vylan has defended chanting “Death to the IDF” at Glastonbury Festival and said he’s “not regretful” about the incident.
The punk duo remain under investigation from Avon and Somerset Police following their set at Glastonbury, but have not been charged with any offences.
Now, their frotntman, Bobby Vylan, is the latest guest on The Louis Theroux Podcast and has spoken for the first time in an interview setting about the chanting, which led to their US visas being revoked, as well as being dropped by their agents UTA.
Vylan told Theroux, “Like what if I was to go on Glastonbury again tomorrow, yes I would do it again. I’m not regretful of it. I’d do it again tomorrow, twice on Sundays. I’m not regretful of it at all, like the subsequent backlash that I’ve faced. It’s minimal. It’s minimal compared to what people in Palestine are going through.”
The singer continued, “If that can be my contribution and if I can have my Palestinian friends and people that I meet from Palestine, that have had to flee, that have lost members in double digits of their family and they can say, yo, your chant, I love it. Or it gave me a breath of fresh air or whatever.”
Vylan also hit back at Damon Albarn, who called it “one of the most spectacular misfires I’ve seen in my life, especially when he started goose-stepping in tennis gear”. Vylan told Theroux, “I just want to say that categorising it as a’“spectacular misfire’ implies that somehow the politics of the band or our stance on Palestinian liberation is not thought out. And as a more senior, experienced, veteran artist – he’s been in this industry for a long time – I think that there were other ways that he could have handled that question being fielded to him.”
Additionally, Vylan said, “I take great issue with the phrase ‘goose-stepping’ being used because it’s only used around Nazi Germany.”
Elsewhere in the podcast, Theroux probed Vylan on the wording of the chant and said a toned-down version, such as “Fuck the IDF”, would “be relatively easy to defend”.
However, Vylan said that it needed to rhyme in order for it to catch on with the crowd, before adding, “Because that is what we are up there to do. We are there to entertain. We are there to play music. I am a lyricist. “Death, Death to IDF” rhymes. Perfect chant.”
The episode of the podcast was recorded before a number of MPs backed a letter from the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester calling for Bob Vylan‘s upcoming Manchester Academy show to be cancelled in the wake of the terrorist attack on a synagogue in the city.
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