There was something in the air at Worthy Farm. Glastonbury and the General Election rarely take place so close to each other and this year there was less than a week between the two of them. Idles, a middle-aged punk band headlining the Other Stage, must have been in their element.
During the last election in 2019 Idles were criticised for waiting until the week before the polls open to put out a last minute “vote, we don’t care who for, just vote!” statement (which has now been deleted from Twitter). Perhaps wisely, they haven’t made any similar statements online this time around (searching for ‘vote’ brings up one tweet with the band thanking fans for voting for them to win an award in 2022), so they got stuck in in real life in stead. Singer Joe Talbot introduced an ‘anti-Farage song’ on Friday night while a small dinghy filled with fake migrants bobbed through the crowds in a stunt supposedly co-ordinated by privately educated Bristolian stencil artist, recent Finsbury Park rent destroyer, and owner of merch shop in Charing Cross, Banksy.
In the aftermath plenty of people pointed out how tone deaf the stunt was. Can you make a political point about migrants dying in the channel by recreating them in mannequin form for the amusement of a quarter of a million people who paid thousands of pounds to take drugs in a field in Somerset? Can you make a political point at Glastonbury at all? Maybe not in its current format.
I don’t think Idles should have headlined, and I didn’t go to see them, obviously, because I think they are cringe. But perhaps they were actually a fitting choice. The band’s confused neoliberal politics — one of their lyrics advises “the best way to scare a Tory is to read and get rich”, which is boring and unambitious and reveals a deep, depressing hatred of the working classes rather than anything else — are increasingly similar to the confused neoliberal politics of the festival itself.
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