Matty Healy he was just doing his job by protesting Malaysian anti-LGBTQ+ laws

The 1975’s Matty Healy has spoken about his on stage protest against Malaysia’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws earlier this year, which saw the band banned from the country and the remainder of the festival they were playing cancelled.

He told the audience at a show in Texas that the backlash that followed was largely the result of “incredibly stupid people on the internet”.

Healy also argued that kissing bassist Ross McDonald on stage at Kuala Lumpar’s Good Vibes festival was “not a stunt simply meant to provoke the [Malaysian] government”, but rather “an ongoing part of The 1975 [stage show] which has been performed many times prior”.

The band were headlining the first night of that event in July and had reportedly made assurances that they would abide by local rules during their set. However, early in the performance, Healy embarked on a rant about the country’s laws against homosexuality, before kissing McDonald on the mouth.

Organisers cut the set short soon afterwards, but the outburst resulted in the remaining two days of the festival being cancelled by the government, and The 1975 hastily leaving the country. Subsequently, the band were sued by artists and vendors who were affected by the cancellation, and the festival itself indicated that it planned to take legal action.

Healy said at the Texas show that he’d been told not to talk about the incident. However, he nevertheless mused: “Unfortunately there’s so many incredibly stupid people on the internet that I’ve just cracked. Everyone keeps telling me you can’t talk about Malaysia, don’t talk about what happened in Malaysia, so I’m gonna talk about it at length”.

And he did. He said that the Malaysian government “had full knowledge of the band with its well-publicised political views and its routine stage show”, and that the “festival organisers’ familiarity with the band was the basis of our invitation”.

“To eliminate any routine part of the show in an effort to appease the Malaysian authorities’ bigoted views of LGBTQ people would be a passive endorsement of those politics”, he said. “As liberals are so fond of saying ‘silence causes violence, use your platform’, so we did that”.

However, he said, it was the reaction of liberal people “which was the most puzzling thing”, adding: “If you truly believe that artists have a responsibility to uphold their liberal virtues by using their massive platforms, then those artists should be judged by the danger and inconvenience that they face for doing so, not by the rewards they receive for parroting consensus”.

Of course, this all ignored the fact that some of Healy’s strongest critics were actually Malaysian LGBTQ+ people, who argued that he had potentially set back years of work to improve things for the community.