Bob Vylan doubles down on Glastonbury backlash: 'I said what I said'
Bob Vylan frontman Bobby Vylan has refused to back down after facing backlash for leading chants including 'death to the IDF' at Glastonbury.
On Saturday the English punk duo – which also includes Bobbie Vylan on drums – took to the festival's West Holts Stage ahead of Kneecap.
During their set, they led festival-goers in chants calling for the end of the Israeli Defence Force and to 'free, free Palestine'.
Soon after police said they were reviewing footage from the performance to determine whether offences have been committed.
A day on Bobby has released a statement about encouraging activism in the next generation.
'As I lay in bed this morning, my phone buzzing non-stop, inundated with messages of both support and hatred, I listen to my daughter typing out loud as she fills out a school survey asking her for feedback on the current state of her school dinners,' he began.
'She expressed that she would like healthier meals, more options and dishes inspired by other parts of the world.
'Listening to her voice her opinions on a matter that she cares about and affects her daily reminds me that we may not be doomed after all. Teaching our children to speak up for the change they want and need is the only way that we make this world a better place.
'As we grow older and our fire possibly starts to dim under the suffocation of adult life and all its responsibilities, it is incredibly important that we encourage and inspire future generations to pick up the torch that was passed to us. Let us display to them loudly and visibly the right thing to do when we want and need change. Let them see us marching in the streets, campaigning on ground level, organising online and shouting about it on any and every stage that we are offered. Today it is a change in school dinners, tomorrow it is a change in foreign policy.'
'I said what I said,' he captioned his post.
His response comes after the band came under fire for the comments made on stage.
Earlier today a post by Avon and Somerset police on social media said: 'We are aware of the comments made by acts on the West Holts Stage at Glastonbury Festival this afternoon.
'Video evidence will be assessed by officers to determine whether any offences may have been committed that would require a criminal investigation.'
Meanwhile spokesperson for the BBC said: 'Some of the comments made during Bob Vylan's set were deeply offensive.
'During this live stream on iPlayer, which reflected what was happening on stage, a warning was issued on screen about the very strong and discriminatory language. We have no plans to make the performance available on demand.' More Trending
Reacting to the furore, Bobby posted a selfie of himself holding a tub of ice cream.
'While zionists are crying on socials, I've just had a tub of (vegan) ice cream,' he shared.
Bob Vylan, who are based in London, perform under stage names to maintain their privacy in face of what they describe as a surveillance state.
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MORE: Who are Bob Vylan, the English punk duo behind Glastonbury IDF controversy?
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A delay could allow BBC staff to cut or bleep controversial political statements, which Glastonbury is renowned for. It came as the BBC has admitted it should have cut the broadcast of 'utterly unacceptable' and 'antisemitic' sentiments in Bob Vylan's Glastonbury set - while facing calls to explain why the corporation did not to more at the time. The new statement came as the punk duo Bob Vylan's frontman doubled down on his 'death to the IDF' chant at Glastonbury - while watchdog Ofcom told the BBC it was 'very concerned' over Saturday's live broadcast. The artist who performs as Bobby Vylan - real name Pascal Robinson-Foster, 34 - is being investigated by Avon and Somerset Police over his performance. Israel 's government has been among those condemning the BBC and Glastonbury for Bob Vylan's Saturday afternoon gig at the music festival in which there were calls for the death of Israeli soldiers in what was broadcast live by the corporation. 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'The antisemitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves. We welcome Glastonbury's condemnation of the performance. 'The performance was part of a live stream of the West Holts stage on BBC iPlayer. The judgement on Saturday to issue a warning on screen while streaming online was in line with our editorial guidelines. 'In addition, we took the decision not to make the performance available on demand. The team were dealing with a live situation but with hindsight we should have pulled the stream during the performance. We regret this did not happen. 'In light of this weekend, we will look at our guidance around live events so we can be sure teams are clear on when it is acceptable to keep output on air.' And an Ofcom spokesperson has now said: 'We are very concerned about the live stream of this performance, and the BBC clearly has questions to answer. 'We have been speaking to the BBC over the weekend and we are obtaining further information as a matter of urgency, including what procedures were in place to ensure compliance with its own editorial guidelines.' Critics including the Conservatives ' Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp have called for action against the BBC - while comparisons have also been made with the 31-month prison sentence handed to Lucy Connolly for inciting racial hatred when posting about burning down a hotel housing asylum seekers. The singer from the band, who officially keeps his identity secret, also declared 'from the river to the sea Palestine will be free' – and has now posted a new statement on Instagram, titled with the defiant phrase: 'I said what I said.' He also told of being 'inundated with messages of both support and hatred'. Robinson-Foster wrote: 'As I lay in bed this morning, my phone buzzing non stop, inundated with messages of both support and hatred, I listen to my daughter typing out loud as she fills out a school survey asking for her feedback on the current state of her school dinners. 'She expressed that she would like healthier meals, more options and dishes inspired by other parts of the world. 'Listening to her voice her opinions on a matter that she cares about and affects her daily, reminds me that we may not be doomed after all. 'Teaching our children to speak up for the change they want and need is the only way that we make this world a better place. 'As we grow older and our fire possibly starts to dim under the suffocation of adult life and all its responsibilities, it is incredibly important that we encourage and inspire future generations to pick up the torch that was passed to us. 'Let us display to them loudly and visibly the right thing to do when we want and need change. 'Let them see us marching in the streets, campaigning on ground level, organising online and shouting about it on any and every stage that we are offered. 'Today it is a change in school dinners, tomorrow it is a change in foreign policy.' The group formed in their hometown of Ipswich in 2017 and have since gone on to release five albums including 2020 debut We Live Here. The frontman has previously spoken of their struggles to get that first album cleared, describing it as being too 'extreme' for some in the music industry - telling the website Louder: 'It was hard to get it released the conventional way - but it was in our power to release it.' Lyrics on their tracks include saying on Britain Makes Me Violent how there is 'nothing great' about Great Britain, while on Reign the frontman declares: 'Got a message for the thieves in the palace, we want the jewels back.' 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He added: 'She caveated what she said by adding 'for all I care', whereas he [Vylan] clearly does care and wants every member of the IDF, which includes virtually the entire population of Israel, to be killed, so the case for prosecuting him is stronger. But to be clear, neither should be prosecuted.' Health Secretary Wes Streeting called the performance a 'pretty shameless publicity stunt', as he suggested the BBC and Glastonbury had 'questions to answer about how we saw such a spectacle on our screens'. And Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called the scenes 'grotesque', writing on X: 'Glorifying violence against Jews isn't edgy. The West is playing with fire if we allow this sort of behaviour to go unchecked.' Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately said she was 'horrified' and that that the BBC should have cut the feed, telling Times Radio: 'Given the nature of the attacks on Israel, the BBC should not have kept broadcasting that. 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Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has spoken to the BBC director general about Bob Vylan's performance, a Government spokesperson said. The BBC earlier said it showed a warning during the performance and that viewers would not be able to access it on demand. A spokesperson for the broadcaster said: 'Some of the comments made during Bob Vylan's set were deeply offensive. Despite the outrage Bobby Vylan, who performs pseudonymously alongside bandmate Bobbie Vylan, posted a photo of some ice cream as he mocked 'Zionists crying on socials' 'During this live stream on iPlayer, which reflected what was happening on stage, a warning was issued on screen about the very strong and discriminatory language. We have no plans to make the performance available on demand.' The Israeli embassy said it was 'deeply disturbed by the inflammatory and hateful rhetoric expressed on stage at the Glastonbury Festival'. The Campaign Against Antisemitism said it would be formally complaining to the BBC over what the group described as an 'outrageous decision' to broadcast Bob Vylan. A spokesperson said: 'Our national broadcaster must apologise for its dissemination of this extremist vitriol, and those responsible must be removed from their positions.' A former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 questioned the BBC's preparation ahead of Bob Vylan's set. Dorothy Byrne, former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 Television, told the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4: 'One wonders what research the BBC did about Bob Vylan because if you look online, he had previously made radical statements about Israel, which is his right, of course. 'But it calls into question the decision to stream him live and then, in view of what was happening in Glastonbury. 'They should really have had a politics producer in the gallery ready to advise them when and if something went wrong. 'I would have expected them to have an alternative feed available anyway because things can go wrong and there were lots of other acts on at the time. 'I'm surprised they just left it on with a warning rather than cut away because it's wrong to call for anyone to be killed. 'You're not, when you're covering a music festival, able to balance up another perspective in a duly impartial debate and coverage of a music festival is not the same as a discussion on the Today Programme. 'But it does mean that yet again we're discussing BBC coverage of Gaza when we should be discussing events in Gaza and the BBC does seem to keep getting itself into grave problems with Gaza.' A former director of communications for ex-prime minister David Cameron said the BBC should cut the feed when there is 'a hint of hate speech' at Glastonbury Festival. Sir Craig Oliver, a former editor of the BBC Six O'Clock News and Ten O'Clock News, told the Today Programme: 'It's clear that for its viewers and the BBC's own reputation there does need to be some form of mechanism that whenever there is a hint of hate speech that you can cut the feed. 'I suspect at next year's Glastonbury there's going to have to be a senior editorial figure who does understand the sensitivities and is going to cut the feed.
The National
an hour ago
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The Great Polish Map of Scotland, the ghostly soldier, and the poet
Or you could listen to the Krakowiak finale of Mackenzie's Violin Concerto of 1884-5, a Scottish composer's sparkling tribute to Krakow's political and cultural defiance. Or how about the 1683 siege of Vienna with Leslie's Scots Infantry Regiment fighting alongside the Poles and Count James Leslie as general of artillery playing a decisive role? Or much earlier, like 1576 when King Stephen Báthory granted the Scots merchants a royal grant and a designated district in Krakow. By the 1600s there were 30,000 Scots living in Poland. There is a Nowa Szkocja in Gdansk; MacLeods became Machlejd; Sinclairs Szynkler; and many more such. The Baltic trade with east coast Scotland was huge and even influenced our architecture. The Second World War reinforced these old connections by the stationing of Polish troops, airmen and seamen in Scotland. Hence the map. For myself, I was pursuing research into an eccentric Scottish composer of the early 1600s. I wrote about Tobias Hume in A Question Of Identity – Tobias Hume in The National on April 14, 2017. Years before, one of my sources was a CD booklet which made reference to the distinguished Polish writer Jerzy Pietrkiewicz's (1916-2007) novel Loot And Loyalty. It featured Hume as its 'hero', and it had a Saltire on its spine. The booklet notes were written by the great English musicologist Thurston Dart and they set me on a wonderful and enlightening trail. I'd never even heard of Loot And Loyalty, never mind its author, and the problem was, the book could not be bought anywhere. The only copy I could find was in the National Library of Scotland and I didn't have enough time in Edinburgh to read it in the library – which does not lend out books. The Saltire was intriguing as, in those days, even the holy bible of Groves Dictionary Of Music And Musicians declared Hume to be English. I knew he was almost certainly a Scot but why had Jerzy had Hume pictured with a Saltire? The only way left for me to find out was to track down Jerzy himself. There seemed, however, to be no way of tracing the man or his whereabouts and I only rooted him out by working on the principle that all Poles resident in Britain would know the hiding places of all other Polish residents. I was sure Jerzy was a UK resident as he was writing and publishing in English, so I contacted my friend Basil (Julian) Barbour. Basil, as he is known to me, when not losing himself in the philosophical conundrums of space-time, earned a crust translating scientific papers from and into Russian. He would therefore have contacts among other translators. Was one of them Polish? Yes, Mr Tybulewicz was and, on being asked to locate Jerzy, offered to act as intermediary. This was in early January 1991, so the Berlin Wall was down, but I guessed that Jerzy either had contacts with Poland which still called for him to keep a low profile or preferred to be left alone. I sent a letter to him, via Mr Tybulewicz, with a cassette tape of some of Hume's music as the true intermediary and it initiated my enduring friendship with Jerzy who replied and lent me a rare copy of Loot And Loyalty which he allowed me to photocopy. This is what I wrote to him after reading it: 'Loot And Loyalty – strange confederations gathering around a central figure whose innocence is alluringly complex and hovering over the dawn of evil. I have never been to those parts of Europe and you have fed me a vision of them full of clammy mists, foetid marshes and succubating mire and I begin to wonder what kind of people can possibly survive there with their souls intact.' In a pathetic petition to the House of Lords, Hume claimed: 'I am an old and experienced Souldier, and have done great service in other forraine Countries as when I was in Russia, I did put thirty thousand to flight, and killed six or seven thousand Polonians by the art of my instruments of warre when I first invented them.' Hume never specified the war weapon he claimed to have invented, so Jerzy imagined disease, carefully cultured and placed in a huge collapsible tower, spreading death through the entire water system of the Pripet marshes. Tobias experimented with ducks: he starved the birds and then watched them drink, each duck from a different pail of polluted water. Those which died after drinking determined the selection of samples, and the stinking pails were guarded in a special shed, until the day – the captain thought with glee in his eyes – when they would dangle from the topmost scaffold of the Great Machine. That's not my imagination, it's Jerzy's and his mystical turn of mind later connected Hume with the Chernobyl disaster. But I have written about this before in the essay mentioned above. Some clue to the Polish context of Jerzy's mystical thought is to be found in his lecture Messianic Prophecy, given in Polish when he was Professor Emeritus of Polish Literature at the University of London. The lecture was published with parallel English text in MCMXCI 'on the occasion of the state visit to the United Kingdom of the president of the Polish Republic Lech Wałęsa April 1991'. He concludes with: 'And yet, and yet. Maybe, to paraphrase the words of King Lear, we will, again and again, take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were the spies of God.' My copy of the lecture is dedicated to me by Jerzy: 'In the sign of Tobias Hume and Archangel Raphael', under which joint protection I remain confident of a kindly reception in the hereafter. Having reacted warmly to my radio plays, he wanted me to make one out of Loot And Loyalty but I did not have it in me to give it the kind of treatment called for by Jerzy's work. Andrea del Verrocchio's 15th-century painting Tobias and the Angel (Image: Archive) Jerzy's own radio play, The Cosmic Clock, was of disturbing originality, with extraordinary sensual imagery and a feel for language all superbly realised by Paul Scofield in a Radio 3 broadcast in 1991. It was inspired by The Saragossa Manuscript, a novel by Jan Potocki, who took his own life in 1815 with a silver bullet, and it is as mystical a work as Jerzy could have wished for. His imagery is disturbing: 'She wore a silver moon on a dark velvet band around her neck, and inside her beautiful body she held a cosmic clock which kept their fourfold time at bay, and the demons never dared to look into her eyes. One did, a stupid goblin they picked up while crossing the Bosphorus, on the day the Sultan was assassinated in Istanbul, and the goblin lost both sight and speech for seventy-seven days.' Work of that nature, with its strange psychological insights and uncompromising sensuality, was in a different league, and that he thought, from my own writings, that I could do anything good with Loot And Loyalty still surprises me. Jerzy's autobiography, In The Scales Of Fate, I found deeply impressive and wrote to tell him so. He was very touched and understanding of my own decidedly mixed feelings about autobiography, for his book troubled me by the extent to which it rummaged in my conscience. Pietrkiewicz had been in exile in the UK (he was a mature student at St Andrews University) since the start of the last world war, in which he was a courier for the Polish underground. He was a renowned poet in Polish, defending the artistic respectability of the peasant life of which his own past forms a moving revelation. He is a fine novelist in English and handles the language with a freshness and directness of peculiar sensitivity, and moral vision – here writing of his peasant uncle who was innocent of the contemptuous treatment being meted out to him at a market: 'The whole scene imprinted itself on my mind because it exemplified my own desire to see dignity as a posture of angels, therefore winged with silence.' This visionary sense is matched by a pervasive but discreet sensuality: 'I loved to catch the flying type of beetle just to feel its sticky abdomen'. Early encounters with the occult provide a fascinating thread throughout the book, which is refreshed by frequent skips forward and back across decades and borders, from his nightmare escape from Poland to his retreat in Andalusia, as connections spark in the memory. There is no slavery to time or place here, and yet no confusion in the narrative. The book is full of many echoes and is therefore full of questions rather than answers. It has been written in submission rather than self-glory. It adds weight to the chain of life and yet invigorates the muscles which need invigorating to cope with the extra burden. Above all, it unfailingly holds the attention with an intelligent and passionate humour. It is that rare thing; a book of wisdom. Here is part of what he wrote in response to my doubts about autobiography, and perhaps it may serve me as a defence for the existence of these memoirs: '... Yes, at 51, your present age, I would have abhorred autobiography, its probing into the dark corridors of the self. And then the orphan syndrome would have been put in operation: show a good face once more, to appease the world. 'Now I know I can no longer procrastinate. I have to use myself as a witness to the memory of a civilization which is almost gone. But the dead, do they care? Sometimes perhaps one of them answers to the echo of his name. Tobias did. And he rewarded me with his recorded music, and now with your letter ...' Elsewhere he wrote: 'The dead are deaf. Mercifully, they don't have to listen to what is shouted above their graves: they stay in line ready for roll-call.' Having spent so much of my life and energies doing what I could for the music of the dead and the long dead, I prefer what he wrote for me: that sometimes perhaps one of them answers to the echo of his – or her – name. One does not well remember the appearance of all one's friends, but Jerzy's I can envisage instantly. He was slight, and as fragile-looking and beautiful as fine bone china. All his movements were sensitive, gentle and executed with unhurried purpose. His eerie, at the top of a villa near Hampstead Heath, looked out upon the disorder of London,but contained within it an ordered and uncluttered world of simple things, carefully placed – a religious statuette, birds, a mug of flowers, all in their own unostentatious way, beautiful – himself a beautiful man.
