Manchester’s Radar Festival have spoken about the decision to pull Bob Vylan from their line-up.
The band played Glastonbury at the weekend, and made a number of controversial comments during their set at the West Holts Stage.
Bob Vylan decried their ex-manager – “a Zionist” – before chanting “death to the IDF” and declaring themselves to be “violent punks” because “sometimes you gotta get your message across with violence because that is the only language some people speak, unfortunately…”
Bob Vylan have been dropped from a number of festivals on the continent, and their next show was due to be Radar Festival at Manchester’s O2 Victoria Warehouse.
In the end, a small statement went out: “Bob Vylan will not be appearing at RADAR Festival this weekend.”
Bob Vylan responded: “Silence is not an option. We will be fine, the people of Palestine are hurting. Manchester, we will be back.”
—
—
Radar organiser Catherine Jackson-Smith appeared on the Two Promoters One Pod podcast which has just gone live, and she described the timeline and circumstances that led to Bob Vylan being withdrawn on the bill.
“It started to become frustrating because there were constant conversations above our collective heads, as a venue and ourselves, about whether Bob Vylan could play,” she explained.
The options were “put very bluntly” to her by those above: “We could continue with Bob Vylan as our headliner. If we continued, we wouldn’t have the festival happening on Saturday.”
“There was not an option for Bob Vylan to step on stage on Saturday; that became apparent at the beginning of the week,” she said.
“[It was] categorically, one of the most horrendous professional discussions I have ever had,” Jackson-Smith continued. “I cannot express clearly enough that I wanted Bob Vylan to perform at our festival.”
“The headlines will be ‘Radar Festival pulled Bob Vylan’. There isn’t room journalistically for the nuance of what is happening to be put into a headline that will go out anywhere, so it won’t. It gives the impression that – not that we are part of the establishment, but I can’t think of a more eloquent way of putting it. That we have joined the course for XYZ consequence, and we haven’t.”
Watch the podcast below.
