we will dance again

In the olden days I used to go to festivals as we all do and leave my wristband on until I could no longer get away with it. For festival-goers the wristband you wore to get in and out of the site every day was a mark of a life-changing weekend you didn’t want to forget. This bracelet is from the Nova festival. I got it when I was in Israel with Nova survivors. Hundreds of the people who went to Nova never came back. I won’t take it off until every hostage is home.

Allow me a trip down memory lane.

The last time I went to Glastonbury was the summer before the pandemic. 2019. I think it was my 11th or 12th year, and I was working for the BBC on that occasion. Glastonbury is the festival I’ll talk about here because it was my destination every year. I would mark calendar years by whether we were in the months pre- or post- Glastonbury. Glastonbury was where I became me, fully formed. I don’t think I’ve been Glastonbury Me anywhere else since, nor will I. I grew up in those fields. Every single person I knew would be there. Magic. I was part of the family at Glastonbury. We all were. We were all Glastonbury “legends”, and pieces of furniture. When Glastonbury takes place it’s one of the highest concentrations of people in the whole of the UK, and it’s certainly the highest concentration of happy lunatics. Our place there was necessary and miraculous.

I went through my iPhoto earlier for some gems from that year. 2019. Identities hidden. But from these text exchanges I can confirm we had great amounts of stupid fun. Me and the bands and the other journalists. The summers at Glastonbury were some of my fondest memories ever, and I can freeze these moments in time and love these people as hard as I ever did, before everything changed.

When I left that last year I wrote this note in my iPhone.

“drive boy, dog boy, dirty numb angel boy, in the doorway boy, she was a lipstick boy...”

The first sounds I ingested at Glastonbury 2019 were the boombox riot of “Born Slippy” by Underworld. The words were trying to escape speakers that seemed way too small to contain such an anthem as I was stood outside the portacabin at Webb’s Ash, waiting to collect my wristband. In the queue I bumped into an old friend from London and I picked up where I left off. “Alright mate, how’s tricks?” etc. And from there, so it went. Days and Nights of chance run-ins with folks who made me feel like time stood still. Folks who made me feel special. Folks who made me feel loved.

Glastonbury seems way too big to be contained at Worthy Farm but somehow that is where it’s all housed for the best weekend of every year. 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.

“Take this much if you want some fun! Take *this* much if you want a bigger trip.” I don’t know how to pass up saying yes to the most. 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 hole 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 bar 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 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 at Webb’s Ash waiting for it to start again.

“drive boy, dog boy, dirty numb angel boy, in the doorway boy, she was a lipstick boy...”

I’ve never been back to Glastonbury. Life changed. I started to talk about the Jewish experience, and nothing was ever the same again.

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A few weeks ago I stood somewhere else. I stood inside the Expo Hall in Tel Aviv at an exhibition commemorating the Nova music festival that took place on October 6-7 in southern Israel. Inside the hall, the light was dimmed to match the time just before the music stopped on October 7. It was dawn, the air was filled with incense, and the beats were still pumping. Tents were set up, taken from the actual site, with belongings (masks, shoes, blankets, makeup kits, etc) strewn around. They had Portaloos there from the festival. The bar and the stage had been transported there. There were walls of the text messages from those festival-goers, too. But they were of a very different nature from mine above. Of note: there was nobody dancing in the Expo Hall, because it wasn’t a festival any more. It was more like a Holocaust museum, complete with piles of shoes. And not old shoes. Shoes that we wear. Modern shoes. Adidas Stan Smiths, Converse Hi-Tops, Vans slip-ons, etc.

Here’s how I took it in.

I did a lot of crazy, hard, traumatic, psychologically ruinous things when I was in Israel but - oddly - this exhibit was the hardest thing I went to, because this should never have happened there. I know how special and extraordinary it is to find yourself having one of the best escapist experiences of your life. Music. Music is the great connector. It strips away all artifice, it can turn a square into a ball of glitter. For 15 years, all I did was write about music as a universal language, and talk that language, and move to that language all over the world with people who spoke it and heard it and danced to it in exactly the same way. So with that said, what I’m left with, what I’m continuing to be left with is this question: Why were the young men and women who attended Nova and who were mass raped, massacred and kidnapped any different from you and I and everyone else?

Why is this exhibit not travelling to LA and New York; to London and Barcelona; to Syndey and Paris and Rome? Why is this exhibit not currently being discussed in the offices of every major and independent music label around the world? Why aren’t artists going to see this exhibit? Why is it that I messaged my friends at Glastonbury about bringing this exhibit to the festival site, and my message was left on read? Why have the music press by and large ignored what’s happened here? Why hasn’t a single band or artist I’ve ever partied with or interviewed said one thing about what took place at Nova? Why?

Weren’t they just the same young idiots who were lucky enough to have a ridiculously good time with everyone they ever loved in one place? Why were they different? Are they not human? Why not?

WHY.

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Terrorists ruined everything. They infiltrated the entertainment industry under the guise of the BDS movement. They flipped the switch against humanity. And now every artist who is deemed to be cool has to support “Free Palestine” in order to keep their audience, without knowing what it means. Without accepting that “From The River To The Sea” means that Hamas disrupts a rave for 3,000 innocent people at something like Nova, and wreaks annihilation and evil destruction.

How can this be my community any longer? Guys, where are you? I’m speaking to you:

I don’t see you post about Adir, a young decapitated Israeli boy; his father last week reported that Adir’s head was taken by Hamas into Gaza to sell for $10,000. I don’t see you post about Kfir Bibas, who earlier this week was “celebrating” his first birthday in Hamas captivity. I don’t see you post about Naama Levy, who we last saw being bundled into a van in bloodied tracksuit bottoms. I don’t see you post about us. We are Jews. It could have been any of us, standing in those fields, dancing the night away, or waking up in our beds in our homes on a Saturday morning.

I don’t see you posting about it. Instead you invert a Holocaust, and say we the Jews are committing one. When, in fact, the only people freeing Gaza from Hamas are Israel.

Your silence isn’t deafening. It’s antisemitic. This is how a Holocaust happens.

I know it’s not sexy. There is nothing to be gained from talking about rape, mutilitation, mass death. Nothing. There is no “selling” the fight against antisemitism. It cannot be popularized. It is the face of true evil, exposed. The truth. Too much for most to handle. But you know what the fight against antisemitism is? It’s the right thing to do. So you just have to get stuck in and do it. That’s it. End of story. The truth is a hard pill to swallow. People need it shoved down their throats.

As for my fellow Jews: standing up for ourselves isn't bold or courageous or brave, or any of those things. It's normal. When people are trying to come for you, it's normal to speak out about it and say - I will defend myself from your baseless life-threatening attacks. Jews won't tell you to "educate yourselves", instead it's normal for us to explain our point of view, and it's normal for us to realize that you'll look for another point of view until you have the one that suits you best. We know you'll do that and we'll laugh because it's so silly. Cool! But we will continue to stand up for ourselves because that's normal. It's a normal human reaction. What isn't normal is avoiding it or being quiet or trying to play both sides. That's weird and stupid and unhealthy. It's good and healthy and normal to stand up for yourself. So be normal. Don’t be like the Jewish popstar who saw me running the other morning and covered their entire face with one hand to avoid having to face me, and their own shame. We partied at Glastonbury together many, many years ago. Never again.

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It’s awards season right now. In years gone by that would be a busy time of year for me. But no more. That part of my life ended, and it’s never coming back.

There are bigger things happening now than awards or industry developments that I would join in celebrating or crying over. For me life got slow and alienated and isolated when I spoke out against what I essentially identified as progressive radicalization a few years ago. I spoke out against it because I saw what was coming, and people responded to me like I was some extremist conspiratorial nutcase. But I was right. I was right.

And so I lost my career and almost all my friends. I lost my social life. I lost everything that was attached to my identity apart from one thing: who I am. I’m a Jew and I believe in the truth. And because of that over the course of time I started to attract more and more people like me. Some Jewish. Some not. But everyone could identify that the loudest people were not telling the truth. They were creating a tribal war and signing up to an ideology they didn’t fully understand. It went from one cause into another into another. So much so that now the people I once knew in the fields of Glastonbury are actively marching in the streets in support of a terrorist organization who mass raped women, kidnapped babies and murdered elderly people in their homes.

I have no regrets. As dark as the world is, I feel security knowing I am aligned with people who see the truth, who have stopped lying to themselves. I’m so grateful to have a platform that means something to people who need it, who congregate around it. Together we can build something better. Something honest. Something that has teeth. Thank you for being here and for supporting me through the worst years, the gaslighting, the bullying and the mocking, the being told I was hysterical, the dehumanization. You came along with me, and there aren’t enough words to thank you. I don’t care about being trolled. I care about fighting terrorism.

Please continue to support my work. Please consider a paid-for subscription so I can continue to do what I do best. You are helping me spread the message when so many people refuse to do it. If I haven’t said it enough: thank you.