Noel Gallagher has decried Glastonbury festival, long a champion of leftwing political causes such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as “getting a bit woke now”.
Speaking to the Sun, the former Oasis guitarist said: “It’s getting a bit woke now, that place, and a bit kind of preachy and a bit virtue-signalling. I don’t like it in music – little fucking idiots waving flags around and making political statements and bands taking the stage and saying, ‘Hey guys, isn’t war terrible, yeah? Let’s all boo war. Fuck the Tories man,’ and all that. It’s like, look – play your fucking tunes and get off.”
Gallagher regularly attends Glastonbury as a festivalgoer, including this year’s event, and made his solo performance debut there in 2022 fronting Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.
“Donate all your money to the cause – that’s it, stop yapping about it,” Gallagher continued. “Let’s just say for instance the world is in a bit of a fucked up place … what’s all the kids in a field at Glastonbury going to do about it? Everybody knows what’s going on in the fucking world, you’ve got a phone in your pocket that tells you anyway. What is the point of virtue-signalling?”
Gallagher added that he loved the festival, calling it “probably the best fucking thing about Britain apart from the Premier League”.
This year’s festival featured some high-profile political statements, most prominently from Banksy, who launched an inflatable raft containing dummy migrants across the crowds at shows by Idles and Little Simz – a comment on small boats that cross the English Channel, a major target of immigration policy by the outgoing Rishi Sunak administration.
Speaking to Sky News, home secretary James Cleverly characterised the action as “joking and celebrating about criminal actions which cost lives … this is not funny, it is vile … deeply distasteful … completely unacceptable”.
Banksy responded: “The home secretary called my Glastonbury boat ‘vile and unacceptable’, which seemed a bit over the top. The real boat I fund, the MV Louise Michel, rescued 17 unaccompanied children from the central Med on Monday night. As punishment the Italian authorities have detained it – which seems vile and unacceptable to me.”
Idles were not aware of the Banksy stunt before their set, though they made political statements of their own, leading the crowd in a chant of “Fuck the king”.
Strong support for Palestine was shown by audiences for 47Soul, a Palestinian-Jordanian alternative rap group, and Palestine flags were also waved in fewer numbers during other sets on the Pyramid stage.
Blur frontman Damon Albarn – former arch-rival to Gallagher – appeared during Bombay Bicycle Club’s set. “Are you pro-Palestine?” he asked the cheering crowd. “Do you feel that’s an unfair war?” He added: “Maybe it’s time we stop putting octogenarians in control over the whole world,” referring to Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s upcoming election battle.
Glastonbury has a rich history of leftwing political thought and action, particularly around environmental issues, with Greenpeace maintaining a major presence at each event. The Left Field stage, curated by Billy Bragg, plays host each year to political discussions, with 2024’s events including panel debates on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the UK housing crisis and more.
The festival’s longest standing political partnership is with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), having started in 1981. Organiser Michael Eavis said he was compelled to support the campaign following the birth of his daughter Emily. “I felt a great need to protect her, because she was so tiny. She really made me think, ‘I’m not going to let her get blown up by a cruise missile!’” he later said. CND and Glastonbury collaborated of a flyering campaign that Eavis credited with kickstarting the popularity of the festival: “It was of huge value for us. The whole success of the festival was actually down to that,” he said.
Gallagher’s comments come amid a wider debate about the intersecting roles of politics and art. This year’s Eurovision song contest was riven with discord over the conflict in Gaza, while an artist-led boycott of Live Nation-promoted festivals such as Download led to the promoter suspending its sponsorship deal with Barclays, over the bank’s provision of financial services to defence companies supplying Israel. Barclays responded by saying: “The protesters’ agenda is to have Barclays debank defence companies, which is a sector we remain committed to as an essential part of keeping this country and our allies safe.”
This year numerous writers and artists also opposed arts sponsorship by investment firm Baillie Gifford, over its holdings in fossil fuel companies and links with Israel, leading to Hay festival and Edinburgh international book festival ending sponsorship deals with the firm. Baillie Gifford said the suggestion that it “is a large investor in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is seriously misleading”, and that it was “not a significant fossil fuel investor”.
Elsewhere in his Sun interview, Gallagher told Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, who was also an attendee at the festival, to “wind his fucking neck in about Oasis”.
Grohl had previously criticised Gallagher and his brother Liam for not doing an Oasis reunion, saying in 2023: “To know that they’re out there somewhere, but they won’t come together to do the thing that everybody would love so much. I’m like: you assholes.”