Shut up and play the hits: The dangers of rock stars getting political

We are smack bang in the middle of open-air concert season, usually a time for sun-fried brainless hedonism and general good vibrations. But this summer has seen a spate of controversies in which flamboyant frontmen make comments from the stage on hot-button local issues, with predictably mixed results. In one case the singer has been threatened with legal action, in another a music festival was abruptly cancelled, and in the most recent incident half the audience left the stadium in protest.

On July 11th, performing at the Sonic Park festival near Turin, Brian Molko of Placebo launched into a diatribe against Italy’s right-wing prime minister. In front of a 5,000-strong audience, he shouted, “Giorgia Meloni, you fascist, racist piece of shit, f**k off.”

Ten days later, at the Good Vibes festival in Kuala Lumpur, Matty Healy of The 1975 attacked Malaysia’s draconian anti-LGBT laws. “I don’t see the f**king point of inviting The 1975 to a country and then telling us who we can have sex with,” Healy said. “Unfortunately you don’t get a set of loads of uplifting songs because I’m f**king furious. And that’s not fair on you, because you’re not representative of your government. Because you’re young people, and I’m sure a lot of you are gay and progressive and cool.”

Meloni subsequently initiated defamation proceedings against Molko under a law that mandates a fine for anyone who “publicly defames the Republic”

And this week, during a stadium concert in the Georgian city of Batumi, The Killers’ lead singer, Brandon Flowers, was booed when he invited a Russian audience member onstage to play drums. “You can’t recognise if someone’s your brother? He’s not your brother?” he demanded of the audience. “We all separate on the borders of our countries? Am I not your brother, being from America?”

Bowel cancer: ‘I truly know what it means to live and am genuinely loving life’

---

That They May Face the Rising Sun: The best Irish film in a very long time

---

‘When our last embryo failed, the clinic told us there was nothing more they could do for us’

---

Take That in Dublin review: ‘Whose idea was it to have stairs?’ puffs Gary Barlow as the band roll back the years with dazzling show

---

Meloni, leader of Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia party, whose roots are in neofascism, subsequently initiated defamation proceedings against Molko under a law that mandates a fine for anyone who “publicly defames the Republic”.

Reaction was swifter in Malaysia, where The 1975 exited the stage shortly after Healy’s outburst and the entire Good Vibes festival was shut down.

In Georgia there was no official retribution, but The Killers subsequently posted an apology for what had happened. “Good people of Georgia, it was never our intention to offend anyone!” the group wrote. “We have a long-standing tradition of inviting people to play drums and it seemed from the stage that the initial response from the crowd indicated that they were okay with tonight’s audience participation member.”

What to make of all this? Molko, a fifty-something Belgian-born Scottish-American, appears relatively well informed about the policies of the current Italian government. That seems less likely with Healy, who had reportedly already disposed of the contents of a bottle of wine onstage before he began his speech, having awoken to the fact that he’d been “invited” to perform in an institutionally homophobic country only after he’d taken to the stage, and presumably well after the fee had safely landed in his account. His “white saviour complex” since been criticised by local LGBT rights activists. Carmen Rose, a Malaysian drag queen, told the BBC Healy’s actions were “performative” and “unruly”. “If he was doing it for our community,” she said, “he would know what consequences we would have to go through.”

As for the poor old Killers, they blundered into a complex geopolitical situation of which they were probably only dimly aware. With 20 per cent of Georgia occupied by Russian troops, and escalating tensions since the invasion of Ukraine between locals and an influx of Russian émigrés, it’s hardly surprising an exhortation to break down borders would meet with a mixed response.

A lot has been written lately about Sinéad O’Connor ripping up that photograph of Pope John Paul II on live television in 1992. The outrage at the time was largely confined to the United States, partly because media was less globalised back then but also because her action was interpreted very differently by Americans than it was in Ireland, where the general reaction was less hysterical. (O’Connor herself probably understood this better than anyone.) Different cultures react differently to provocations.

Since the shift in their revenue model away from recording royalties and towards live ticket sales, performers of all stripes, from 1990s heritage acts such as Placebo to more recent arrivals such as The 1975, are spending more time on the road. Inevitably, there’ll be an element of “If it’s Saturday, this must be Kuala Lumpur/Turin/Batumi”. There are perils in sharing your underdeveloped world view with tens of thousands of strangers in a country that may be a lot more foreign than the view from your five-star hotel would suggest. While there’s nothing wrong with performers expressing their opinions about places they know something about, when they’re on the road they might be better advised to just shut up and play the hits.