Credit: Far Out / Samuel Bradley

Matty Healy says The 1975 were “briefly imprisoned” following on-stage kiss at Malaysian festival

Tue 10 October 2023 19:22, UK

The 1975 singer Matty Healy has defended his on-stage kiss with bandmate Ross MacDonald at Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival and claimed the band were “briefly imprisoned” following the incident.

Homosexuality is illegal in the Asian country, and in the middle of their headline performance in July, Healy and MacDonald protested against Malaysia’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Before the act, he told the crowd: “When we were booking shows, I wasn’t looking into it. I don’t see the fucking point, right? I do not see the point of inviting the 1975 to a country and then telling us who we can have sex with.”

As a result, their set was cut short, and the rest of the festival was cancelled. Future Sound Asia, the company behind the Good Vibes festival, also began legal action against the group and sent a Letter Of Claim to the Cheshire band and recently revealed they were making “progress” towards a resolution.

On October 9th, Healy delivered a ten-minute speech relating to the incident during the band’s show in Fort Worth, Texas. In his monologue, The 1975 frontman hit out at “liberal outrage” regarding the backlash to the kiss and name-checked The Strokes singer Julian Casablancas, who condemned Healy breaking Malaysian laws. The Strokes were also set to play Good Vibes, but their performance was cancelled.

Healy told the crowd: “It was the liberal outrage against our band for remaining consistent with our pro-LGBTQ stage show which was the most puzzling thing. Lots of people, who appear to be liberal people, contended that the performance was an insensitive display of hostility against the cultural customs of the Malaysian government and that the kiss was a performative gesture of allyship.”

“To call the 1975’s performance colonialism is a complete inversion of the word’s meaning… We have no [power] at all to enforce will on anyone in Malaysia. In fact, it was the Malaysian authorities who briefly imprisoned us,” Healy added.

He continued: “For performers like Julian Casablancas, who took to Twitter to criticise us, this bizarre mangling of colonial identity politics merely served as an expedient way to express their own disappointment with the festival’s cancellation.”

The singer stated: “These are the kind of mental gymnastics that are employed by celebrities to save face with their liberal-appearing audience, who delight in having their favourite academic catchphrases parroted at them… Levelling accusations of colonialism against Western critics is by now a standard PR procedure in the authoritarian theocracy playbook.”

The 1975 frontman claimed they “chose to not change our set that night to play pro-freedom of speech, pro-gay songs” and said adapting their performance due to Malaysian law “would be a passive endorsement of those politics.”

Watch Healy’s speech in Fort Worth below.