batshit all balls to the wall insane

“Jesus Christ on a plastic sign”

— charli xcx, “everything is romantic”, brat (2024)

Bob Vylan have been removed from Radar Festival. The festival themselves have alluded that it wasn’t their decision, and the UK Lawyers for Israel have publicly spoken about their part in the decision. And honestly? We should all be fucking horrified.

This is how fascism has always worked. Artists are bullied, blacklisted, and erased in desperate attempts to rewrite public memory and keep us complicit in atrocity. It’s happening right now. And if we don’t fight back, we’re fucked.

Unsurprisingly, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) pressured the Academy Music Group, owners of the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester, to cancel Bob Vylan’s performance. They wrote to the venue, warning that Bob Vylan’s appearance might carry legal risks and citing the possibility that the artist would repeat chants they allege to be antisemitic. They listed potential legal breaches if Bob Vylan were allowed to play.

Apolitical bands and music industry folk may see this as a problem that doesn’t concern them — but simply put, a group of lawyers acting on behalf of a foreign government should not be deciding who gets to hold a microphone in the UK. It’s not up to lawyers to decide what shows can go ahead. That choice belongs to promoters, to venues, and to the people in the room. It’s up to us whether we choose to support artists or not — but this? This is nothing short of the tactics used by fascists.

You might disagree with what Bob Vylan said. That’s not the point. This opens the gateway for any promoter — small or big — to face threatening legal pressure when putting on an artist that challenges a government-endorsed framing of events. And that affects all of us.

If we allow this, where does it end?

Our music venues are dying as it is. Promoters are struggling. Artists are losing the spaces where they learn their craft, where they find their audience, where they build community. Radar Festival is a small, independent festival run by a handful of people. They don’t have the manpower or the resources to take on these kinds of legal threats — especially when the language used is so dense, so intimidating, that the average person would feel terrified of standing their ground.

Music is the cultural backbone of the UK. And in every era of speech oppression, music has stood as an outlier — a place where dissent survives.

This is not cancel culture. This is the systematic, orchestrated silencing of pro-Palestinian voices — and it is decimating our music scene as collateral damage. Don’t let them.

These are not isolated incidents. This is a systematic silencing of pro-Palestinian voices under the guise of defending Jewish safety – but make no mistake, this is not about protecting Jewish people. It’s about protecting the Israeli state from criticism. They tried to do the same to Kneecap, only Glastonbury has the means to fight for itself.

Allowing external bodies like UKLFI to dictate who can and cannot perform in our venues is far more damaging to Jewish people than chants against a military body responsible for the murder of 300,000+ Palestinians. This isn’t about Jewish safety. It’s about shutting people up. About rewriting the reality of the Israeli government and its ongoing atrocities.

The British government will do nothing about this attack on free speech and our cultural spaces. UKLFI will continue to roam unchecked, dismantling our scene from the inside while preaching the language of safety. It will not make Jewish people safer. And it will fail at changing the truth.

If jobsworths could get their fucking hands off our music scene, that would be brilliant. And to every so-called "apolitical" gig-goer: you don’t get to enjoy the fruits of a hard-fought, diverse, politically radical live music scene while staying silent when the people who built it are being erased. Now is the time to turn your backwards cap around and get fucking angry.

If a promoter decides to pull an artist? It can be morally stinky, but that’s a promoter’s decision. When an external body of lawyers, openly working to protect the interests of the Israeli state, decides what music can and cannot be played? That should horrify every single one of us.

Get angry. Don’t shut up. Be a jobsworth for this scene. Because if we don’t protect it, they will dismantle it, one show at a time.