Bob Vylan performing on the West Holts stage during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, England, June 28, 2025. Photo by Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images
(JTA) — A British punk band called Bob Vylan led thousands of Glastonbury attendees in chanting “Death, death to the IDF” in one of multiple pro-Palestinian sets at the vaunted music festival on Saturday.
After the group’s lead singer, who goes by the stage name Bobby Vylan, led the crowd in chanting “Free Palestine,” he asked, “Have you heard this one, though?” He then initiated the chant calling for death to the Israeli army, which audience members — many waving Palestinian flags — repeated in unison. The singer concluded, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, inshallah,” before launching into a song.
At another point, the singer denounced what he said was complicity by the British government in “war crimes and genocide” by the Israeli government in Gaza, adding, “We’re not pacifist punks. We are the violent punks because sometimes you gotta get your message across with violence because that is the only language that some people speak, unfortunately.”
The music festival, one of the United Kingdom’s largest, distanced itself from the performance, saying in a statement, “Glastonbury Festival does not condone hate speech or incitement to violence of any kind from its performers.”
The festival had rebuffed calls to drop Kneecap, an Irish rap group with a record of anti-Israel festival performances whose singer faces a terrorism charge over his alleged display of the Hezbollah flag. Bob Vylan dedicated a song to Kneecap, which performed half an hour later on the same stage.
Government officials, the Israeli embassy and the BBC, which streamed the set live, all expressed concerns about Bob Vylan’s performance. The BBC called the comments “deeply offensive” and said it would not include the set in the version of the festival it preserves online.
The BBC cut its livestream proactively for Kneecap’s set, following the group’s “F–k Israel” projection at the Coachella festival in the United States in April. Millions of people watched online through the TikTok stream of a Welsh cafe owner whom Kneecap later thanked.
The band preceded its set with a video pillorying those who had called for its cancelation and suggesting that the outcry over its Coachella performance had been a boon.
During the set, the group led audience members in chanting, “F–k Keir Starmer,” referring to the British prime minister who had said he believed it was inappropriate for the band to be playing Glastonbury. A band member wore a shirt reading “We are all Palestine Action,” a reference to the activist group that last week vandalized British military planes and now faces a possible ban under British anti-terrorism laws.
Local police said they were investigating following the performances. “We are aware of the comments made by acts on the West Holts Stage at Glastonbury Festival this afternoon,” Avon and Somerset Police said in a statement on Saturday. “Video evidence will be assessed by officers to determine whether any offences may have been committed that would require a criminal investigation.”
The performances follow a pro-Palestinian set by a prominent Irish band, Fontaines D.C., last month at another major European music festival, Primavera in Spain.
Kneecap, meanwhile, is booked for a North American tour this fall. Almost all of its dates are sold out.
