Bob Vylan
Something Kind of Wonderful stage, Sunday
★★★★☆
All Together Now’s Something Kind of Wonderful tent is a sea of Palestine flags as the iconoclastic punks Bob Vylan make their entrance. The British duo had been booked to play a smaller stage but were bumped up after their recent Glastonbury performance went viral.
“Apparently there has been a lot of interest in the band recently,” says its frontman, Bobby Vylan (whose real name is widely reported to be Pascal Robinson-Foster). “And so they have to move us over here.”
He’s referring to the uproar that ensued at the British megafestival after Vylan led chants of “Death, death, death to the IDF”, referring to the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.
Several festivals cancelled the group, and the United States revoked their visas. But they’ve made it to Waterford, where they put in a fantastically furious set that breathtakingly meshes punk and politics.
READ MORE
Wearing tracksuit leggings and shoulder-length hair, Vylan starts off bouncing on the spot. He encourages the audience to warm up with some stretching and then plunge into We Live Here, an acid-bath commentary on racism in Britain and its ever-mutating forms (“have a drink and puff your chest out / not a racist, you’re just proud”).
Long before Glastonbury, Bob Vylan – Bobby is backed by the drummer “Bob Vylan” – had a reputation for getting stuck in: at a show at Whelan’s in Dublin in 2023, they called out by name artists who they felt weren’t advocating on behalf of Gaza. There’s more where that came from at All Together Now, all of it cheered wildly by the audience.
Vylan’s message is that his forebears’ experiences are interwoven with those of Irish people and of the population in Palestine today.
“As black people in England we understand that our struggle, as it is connected to our homelands, whether it be Jamaica or we trace it all the way back to the African continent ... is the Irish fight. And the Irish fight is the Palestinians’ fight. And the Palestinians’ fight is the fight of all people that have suffered under occupation, under colonialism, under imperialism.”
He also references attacks on the group back in Britain that echo earlier calls to have Kneecap, the Belfast/Derry rappers, dropped from Glastonbury. “We will not have any right-wing media – or any media at all ... even the soft left – tell us we have gone too far. We will not have them tell us that we should keep our mouths shut and focus on the music.”
There is now a traditional call-and-response of Free, Free Palestine. At the end, Vylan says, “Have you heard this one, though?” and leaves the room hanging. Next come shouts of “Death, death, death to the IDF” – though only from a minority. (The singer does not join in.)
They finish with Hunger Games, a riotous diatribe about the human price of austerity and the cost-of-living crisis. As things stand they’re in danger of becoming better known for their speeches than for their songs, but the lesson of this brilliantly pummelling onslaught is that Bob Vylan’s music is more than capable of speaking for itself.
