Bobby Vylan has no regrets.
In his first interview since leading chants of “death, death, death to the IDF” at Glastonbury, the frontman of punk duo Bob Vylan (pronounced “villain”), spoke to The Louis Theroux Podcast about the controversy and its fallout.
The chant ignited a firestorm of criticism, with Bob Vylan, at the time a largely unknown band, at the center of it.
Glastonbury condemned the chant, the band was dropped by its agency, UTA, and the U.S. State Department revoked the band members’ visas, forcing them to cancel their planned tour of North America. The BBC has admitted it broke its own editorial guidelines by live broadcasting Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance, though the U.K. public broadcaster’s Executive Complaints Unit stopped short of calling the broadcast an incitement or a violation of impartiality rules.
But if he had the chance, Vylan told Theroux, he’d do it all again.
“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,” the rapper, who uses the stage name Bobby Vylan (his bandmate goes by Bobbie Vylan), said. “The subsequent backlash that I’ve faced. It’s minimal. It’s minimal compared to what people in Palestine are going through. [What] is there to regret? Oh, because I’ve upset some right-wing politician or some right-wing media?”
Bob Vylan briefly became the focus of public outrage, alongside other bands that publicly criticized Israel for its conduct in the war in Gaza. Irish rap group Kneecap was similarly criticized for posting a “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine” message on the stage during their performance at the Coachella festival in April, and there were calls to ban the group from Glastonbury. In the end, Kneecap did perform, but the BBC did not livestream their performance.
Vylan told Theroux the backlash was “so disproportionate,” arguing that it turned public attention away from Gaza. “My whole issue with this thing is that the chant is so unimportant,” he said. “What is important is the conditions that exist to allow that chant to even take place on that stage. And I mean, the conditions that exist in Palestine. Where the Palestinian people are being killed at an alarming rate. Who cares about the chant?”
He said the controversy, while intense, ultimately “allowed for that conversation to have a new life almost,” crediting the debate it sparked for helping to “focus the attention back onto Gaza, back onto the people of Palestine.”
Vylan confirmed that UTA dropped the band the day after the performance, calling it a top-down decision. “The call came on the Sunday, we played on Saturday,” he said. “On Sunday, that’s when our agent called and was like, ‘look guys, I’ve got to let you go.’ He said that ‘it’s come from the most senior members of the company.’ He didn’t have any choice. It was either we go or he goes.”
He also addressed the U.S. State Department’s revocation of the group’s visas, describing it as “a scare tactic.” “They have done that specifically, seeing the media attention and the discourse that it created and have sought to suppress that from happening any further,” Vylan said. “Possibly to make us persona non grata, don’t stand next to this band. It might hurt your chances of getting your visa.”
When asked about accusations that the chant encouraged antisemitism, Vylan rejected any link. “I don’t think I have created an unsafe atmosphere for the Jewish community,” he said. “If there were large numbers of people going out and going like ‘Bob Vylan made me do this,’ I might go, oof, I’ve had a negative impact here.” The episode notes that the interview was recorded on Oct. 1, before the Oct. 2 Manchester synagogue attacks in which two people were killed and three others injured.
Discussing the broader reaction, Vylan said the band had been “attacked to a degree that I haven’t really seen anybody else attacked for speaking up about this issue,” suggesting that race was a factor in the scale of the response. “As with everything, race comes to play a part in that we are an easier villain, no pun intended, than they are because we are already the enemy,” he said. “You don’t really need to give much context as to why the British public should hate us.”
Vylan also responded to criticism from fellow musicians, singling out Blur frontman Damon Albarn for describing the performance as “one of the most spectacular misfires I’ve seen in my life.” “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,” Vylan said. He called Albarn’s use of the term “goose-stepping” to describe his movements on stage “disgusting,” adding, “It’s only used around Nazi Germany… I think his response was disgusting.”
By contrast, Vylan praised Chuck D for his response to the controversy. The Public Enemy frontman defended Bob Vylan, saying the “Death to the IDF chants” meant “‘death to imperialism,’ ‘death to colonialism’” not “death to a people.” The U.K. rap duo “ain’t got no tanks,” Chuck D. noted in an interview with The Independent published July 6. “They’re using words to say something must end. You can’t really kill nobody with a guitar or a microphone.”
“His response was, again, not because it was more favorable to us, but because he understood,” Vylan said. “Naturally, of course, Chuck D from Public Enemy is going to understand where we are coming from with our politics. More so than Damon Albarn.”
The Louis Theroux Podcast is available on Spotify now.
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