Poison me, daddy

Matthew Healy said the following ahead of headlining Glastonbury for the first time in his and his band - The 1975’s - career last night:

“People who are watching this may — I don’t know… They may be disappointed in the lack of politics in this show and our forthcoming shows and probably our future shows. I want you to know that it’s a conscious decision. We honestly don’t want our legacy to be one of politics. We want it to be that of love and friendship. I’m not trying to be too earnest, but you can go out into the world and there’s loads of politics everywhere. We don’t need more politics. We need more love and friendship.”

I agree. I remember when we were all just friends. And there was no woke politics. I remember it well. It really is a shame that people grow up and forget the simple joy of being young and stupid and excited. The above statement and The 1975’s set last night, however, proves that they didn’t forget at all. They’re holding onto something pure, and it’s much needed.

For almost fifteen years, I was one of the golden children of pop culture journalism. I had a talent with words, and a lack of fear about approaching subjects - people or issues - that would intimidate weaker people my age who were just trying to make friends. I managed to do the hard stuff and make friends with everyone, and I guess that made me an easy target when the haters found their angle. During the height of my success, there was nobody I couldn’t get to, and nothing I couldn’t take on.

It wasn’t just about the sitting down and interviewing, it was about the relationships. I had every single person in my pocket that needed to be there. The editors. The photographers. The stylists. The publicists. The managers. The bands. Everyone would make everything happen because we all loved working together, and we knew we would have stories that the entire world would salivate over in the right way. Publicists loved me because they could tell their clients they had the most amazing piece lined up, while I horse-whispered it into existence. I had a vision that people valued and respected. I didn’t pander to editorial demands, but found a balance every time between what the subject wanted their story to be, and what I judged was the one that would best serve them and the audience being written for. My name carried a professional weight that was unquestioned because I never missed, and I never ever did anyone dirty. I protected my friends, while challenging them in a respectful manner, and I was a vault for people’s deepest secrets. I never breached the confidentiality of my peers. They trusted me.

At the age of 25, I was at the helm of the biggest weekly music magazine in the world. I laugh at myself now, remembering how I had the guts to hard-ball David Bowie while he was alive. We said there was no way we would cover his album The Next Day unless we had an original shoot for the front page. At 8pm the night before the image was due to be sent to the printers every week, an email landed in my inbox. “Eve, db shot this earlier this morning in his New York City apartment for the NME. I hope it works.” It worked alright. He got his cover.

Now there are very few people, if any, doing the type of editorial work behind-the-scenes that was so well-oiled before all this progressive politic infected every single corner of the arts world. And it shows. It shows because nobody has vision any more. I have been regularly racking my brains for the best top tier profile writers in arts and culture journalism. Let me tell you, it’s hard to curate a list. I can’t remember the last time I read a piece that knocked me sideways. All that is left now is fear and hate. And both feed each other.

[2018 was a particularly busy years for writing magazine covers]

I have found myself asking repeatedly if I have a place in the world any more? And if so, what is it… This is what I loved to do. It was what I was born to do. And don’t get me wrong, the work I do here is important to me. What I have built is special. It’s successful. It’s a bestseller. I’m proud of it. It’s just not where I thought I would land.

Which brings me to the fact that it’s Glastonbury weekend right now. Yesterday I was feeling a bit off, because I always imagined that the day The 1975 headlined, I’d be in the crowd. I knew they would get there. I like Matthew Healy a lot. He’s always been quietly lovely to me and I will say that out of the thousands of people I’ve interviewed, I found him to be consistently the most interesting. I really, really loved sparring with Matty. He’s a thoughtful human who is often ridiculed for no good reason. He’s a man - and a white man – and he’s emotional. He’s also the opposite of a con. He’s not faking anything he does. He leaves his heart on the lip of the stage, even when people are so desperate to berate him. I think Matty has courage. So do millions of people who follow him wherever he goes.

We did a deep-dive Vulture interview when their perhaps best ever album was released in 2018, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. Here’s a snippet that I find relevant. Firstly, it demonstrates that what he said about his headline set is nothing new, but a continuation of an ethos he’s had about what it means to be in a band for many, many years. And secondly, it provides a panacea to the atrocious scenes that occurred today at Glastonbury festival of which we’ll get into shortly…

We’ve talked in the past about getting political. Why do you think it’s appealing to pop stars? Do you think it’s part of selling the product?
Matthew Healy: Make art and stand by it. Don’t make art that’s not political then expect us to listen to you. I see artists and their main projection isn’t related to their music. If it was in the music I wouldn’t have a problem, but it seems opportunistic when it’s not. It’s easy to learn the rhetoric of the left. Of course racism’s bad, of course women must be heard. Let’s make something inspiring that isn’t just part of this stream of fucking talking, right? Do I sound like an arse?

If you’re not going to make art that’s important to culture, don’t use easy rhetoric to sell it.
Exactly.

What have you learned about your bandmates since rehab?
It’s reinstated that we’re brothers for life.

What led you to heroin in the first place?
You’re either gonna do that shit or you’re not. It’s not like it was wine, weed, cocaine, then heroin. You make a choice. I had a childhood carnal desire to be sedated. That combined with thinking it was fucking cool. It sounded like my vibe. No one I knew was into it. I’m from a small town outside Manchester, not London. Junkie chic wasn’t my thing. It was always private. I never wanted to be Pete Doherty.

Did it make you feel separate from your band or audience?
No. It made me feel … better. It’s so busy and loud just being alive. When you wake up it’s so fucking loud. So that kind of gets rid of it. I’m a very addictive person. Anything that has ceremony I’m a sucker for.

How do you deal with the noise without it?
You readjust. It used to be one of those commas I looked forward to. The reason it’s so hard to quit is because you have nothing else that does that. Quitting is cognitive behavioral therapy: Keep doing something, eventually it’ll become all right. Sometimes you gotta do it. It’s like fucking getting fit. Just do it. Or don’t. Don’t moan or figure out different ways. There’s only one way: not doing it. That’s how you quit.

Do you feel confident that you’re quitting?
Um. Yeah? But to be honest with you, one of the reasons I don’t wanna talk about it is because I don’t deal with change well. I move forward. If I think about it, I go backward. I’ve tried to distract myself. It’s so hard when there’s no answer as to why. Why? Because it’s better. Because you should. I don’t wanna have a baby because of my sense of salvation.

It’s okay to think that having a kid can be selfish.
Yeah. There’s not much out there for them. I worry if there’s really any point. Is there?

You’re asking if there’s a point to having kids?
Can we not? Some stuff me and my missus have to iron out.

It’s ironic that mental health has, in some sense, become this trend, but people aren’t helping each other …
It pisses me off. It’s trendy to be woke. You weaponize victimhood so anybody that’s had a tough time can win a debate. That’s not a critical course of action. All these debates we see about gender, trans people, racism … nobody ever mentions that they’re enjoying it. Nobody ever references how fun it is to be right. If you’re right, you get 400,000 lovely hearts. Could they be doing it for that? Possibly. A little bit. My favorite is on Instagram where the most beautiful person takes a photo of themselves looking beautiful and gives a speech about how their self-confidence has been low. I don’t get it. I spend so much time on Instagram looking at men who take selfies. I think I’ve taken one.

You’ve taken only one selfie?
No, wait. I did an Instagram live video and took a screenshot from it. I’ve never taken a selfie.

Glastonbury. What to say. Well let’s start with what happened today.

On the West Holts stage, typically commandeered by rap and dance music, an artist I’ve never heard of from London, Bob Vylan, led the thousands-strong crowd into death chants against Jewish people, in a way that the Left have argued is socially acceptable. “Death to the IDF!” he screamed. “From the river to the sea”, while a sea of Palestinian flags waved. It got worse. He performed a song telling Jews to fuck off, basically. “Heard you want your country back? Shut the fuck up” went the chorus, over and over.

The reason you’re watching this clip is because it was live-streamed on the BBC. The impartial BBC. Yeh. Chanting death at a “peace” festival? Live-streaming racial hatred and incitement to violence? The national broadcaster putting on genocidal rants as a form of entertainment? As we say in the UK: that is a madness.

I wrote this to Emily Eavis, who runs Glastonbury festival. We used to get along.

Glastonbury has become a festival of hate today and descended into barbaric chants against Israel and the Jewish people. Glastonbury is a festival I once called home. A dozen or so times, I attended. I made magazines onsite. I led a team of scores of talented writers and photographers with the NME. I went as part of team BBC, as part of Billboard, as part of Q, as part of Vulture. I grew up there. I am not just heartbroken. I am dismayed. I am disgusted. Emily Eavis, you should go to Re’em and see what happened at a music festival in Southern Israel on the 7th of October, 2023. What happened to you? A Jew x

Oh and then there was Kneecap. Kneecap’s gig was at capacity and the West Holts field had to be shut down early so as not to overflow with people. That’s right. October 7 was the best thing to ever happen to Kneecap. The Irish band has supported Hamas and Hezbollah, and demanded that people kill their local Tory. Is this worse than the 1930s? I can’t tell. It’s depraved that this is the new normal. As Jake Wallis Simons said in today’s Telegraph: “For years, sensible people have scratched their heads at how the Left can have come to support Jihadis. At the Glastonbury festival of narcissism, however, it has become difficult to tell them apart.” It’s true. They are one and the same. And the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis loved it. Alexis, not that we’ll ever cross paths again, but fuck you, man. Sunkissed good vibes?

I was hopeful earlier this week, as a friend of mine was trying to ease a FOMO I felt in advance of another year of a festival I used to define my calendar year around. I defended the ethos of Glastonbury and said that the festival was too big to be marred by a couple of Jew-hating acts here and there. It is the biggest music and arts festival in the entire world. Every year of my twenties I defined as pre- and post- Glasto. The sheer amount of life-affirming experiences I’ve had there are too long to list. But I was part of the farm, and it was part of me. My list of iconic Glastonbury stories are for members only. But I will share what I wrote one year in a journal on my way home, so you can get a sense of what the magic of this place once was, before it shamed itself by becoming a meeting point of violent radicalism:

“The experience is one of surging; to keep going, to never have it end, to avoid blinking so as not to miss a split second of sights, sounds, and embraces. It is a rampage by those who need to remember themselves just so they can forget all over again. I’ll take 24 hours, five dawns and as many dusks. I’ll make plans to see Shangri-la or the Stone Circle, to wander the Green Fields, or party in a I i can’t remember how to get back to, and then I’ll fuck all those plans off to sit on a plank of wood by a toilet for four hours confessing my deepest secrets to a long lost pal. I’ll go wherever the festival leads me and I’ll spend months processing it afterwards while struggling to remember any of it at all, except for the important part - the knowledge that it happened again, that everyone was there and that it felt so easy. All in spite of the effort to stand in the cold until it turned hot again, to piss in a shit tip so disgusting it’s almost charmed, to not know you’re hungry until you’re leaving. All in spite of this dire comedown now that won’t shift completely until I’m back at the queue waiting for it to start again next year.”

What is happening to the country of my birth? United Kingdom, how disunited you have turned out to be. One of the four nations – Ireland – is fast becoming the new Nazi Germany. Just in today:

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. Either you’re with us or you’re not but you have to make a choice. There is no version of traversing a world in which Jews live and a world in which antisemites soar. It’s us or it’s them.

In the words of The 1975, sincerely:

And we can find out the information access all the applications
That are hardening positions based on miscommunication
Oh, fuck your feelings, truth is only hearsay
We're just left to decay, modernity has failed us

And I'd love it if we made it
Yes, I'd love it if we made it
Yes, I'd love it if we made it
Yes, I'd love it if we made it