Bob Vylan frontman Bobby Vylan has given his first interview since the punk duo’s controversial Glastonbury performance, insisting that he has no regrets about leading his audience in a chant of “death, death to the IDF”.
Speaking on an edition of Louis Theroux’s podcast, published earlier today, Vylan says of him instigating the contentious chant against the Israeli Defence Forces, “I would do it again tomorrow, twice on Sundays”. However, he admits that he was surprised by the scale of the backlash to his televised Glastonbury set, insisting that BBC staff on site were initially positive about the performance.
Asked to clarify what was exactly meant by the IDF chant, the musician says that’s “unimportant”, though does admit that the specific choice of words was partly lyrical, in that “death, death to the IDF” rhymes. He notes, “‘end, end the IDF’ does not rhyme” so it “wouldn’t have caught on, would it? … We are there to entertain. We are there to play music. I am a lyricist. ‘Death, death to IDF’ rhymes. Perfect chant”.
Outrage prompted by the duo’s Glastonbury set, and the BBC's live broadcast of it, certainly raised the profile of Bob Vylan, but also resulted in them losing their booking agents and US visas, and facing widespread calls for their shows to be cancelled.
However, he tells Theroux, those setbacks are “minimal compared to what people in Palestine are going through”. While stressing that he doesn’t want to “overstate the importance of a chant”, he adds that it’s the Palestinian people “that I’m doing it for, they’re the people that I’m being vocal for”.
And “if I have their support”, he goes on, “what is there to regret? Oh, because I’ve upset some rightwing politician or some rightwing media?” With that in mind, he says, “if I was to go on Glastonbury again tomorrow, yes I would do it again - I’m not regretful of it”.
Plenty of right wing politicians and journalists - as well as key members of the Labour government - were critical about Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury set, during which Bobby Vylan also led a chant of “free, free Palestine” and declared that “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be - will be - free”.
The BBC was also strongly criticised for live broadcasting the set without editing out the controversial components. Last month the broadcaster’s own Editorial Complaints Unit concluded that Bob Vylan’s performance did include expressions of antisemitism and breached the BBC’s editorial standards in relation to harm and offence.
However, it said the duo had not breached guidelines on “material likely to encourage or incite crime”, and also concluded that - in the context of the broadcaster's Glastonbury coverage - Bobby Vylan's on-stage comments did not represent a breach of the BBC’s impartiality rules.
In addition to the chants of “death, death to the IDF” and “free, free Palestine”, the BBC ECU’s report also references an element of Bob Vylan’s set that got less attention at the time, in which Bobby Vylan talked about the boss of a record company he once worked for.
According to the ECU, the musician said that this label exec “would talk about his support for Israel”. Bobby Vylan then went on to describe the label boss “in the most abusive terms, using the most offensive language, also referring to ‘fucking Zionists’”.
All these things together went beyond “generally accepted standards”, the ECU said, while the label exec comments also breached specific BBC harm and offence guidelines that deal with “unduly intimidating, humiliating, intrusive, aggressive or derogatory remarks aimed at real people”.
Elsewhere in its report, the ECU said that, while the lines “free Palestine” and “from the river to the sea” can be inferred to promote “the disappearance of the state of Israel”, they “can also be regarded as no more than expressions of support for aspirations to a Palestinian state and do not of themselves threaten violent action”.
Meanwhile the chant of “death, death to the IDF”, while “clearly more problematic”, is “directed at an institution rather than individuals, and one which is not defined by ethnic or religious composition”. Which is why the ECU concluded those statements did not breach guidelines regarding “material likely to encourage or incite crime”, especially as they were made in the context of a musical performance.
However, it said that the chants in support of Palestine and against the IDF, when accompanied by the “earlier comments about the record company boss”, meant that the “content of this act, taken in the round, can fairly be characterised as antisemitic”. And “although Bob Vylan referred to ‘Zionists’ rather than ‘Jews’, that appeared to the ECU to be a distinction with very little difference in this instance”.
Despite the BBC ECU concluding that the Bob Vylan set did not encourage or incite crime, a previous report by the Community Security Trust, a charity that seeks to protect Jewish people from antisemitism, claimed that the performance did in fact contribute to a spike in antisemitic incidents.
But Bobby Vylan rejects those claims in the Louis Theroux interview, stating “I don’t think I have created an unsafe atmosphere for the Jewish community”. If there were “large numbers of people going out and going like ‘Bob Vylan made me do this’”, he added, “I might go, oof, I’ve had a negative impact here”. But he doesn’t accept that is the case.
At the start of Theroux’s podcast, he stresses that his interview with Bobby Vylan took place before - and therefore does not reference - some key recent events, including the Manchester synagogue attack on 2 Oct, in which two people were killed, and the Gaza ceasefire that came into effect on 10 Oct.