Several bands pulled out of the Victorious music festival just hours before their scheduled performances, after Irish band The Mary Wallopers had their mics cut off during a pro-Palestine protest.
The folk group took to the stage at the Portsmouth event on Friday (22 August), where they displayed a Palestinian flag.
Organisers of the festival initially claimed that the band’s set was cut short for using a chant “widely understood to have a discriminatory context”. The Mary Wallopers denied the claim, asked for the festival to retract its “misleading” statement and shared footage of the moment on Instagram.
Brit Award-winning band The Last Dinner Party and Irish rock bands Cliffords and The Academic then announced on Saturday afternoon that they were pulling out of the event.
“We are outraged by the decision made to silence The Mary Wallopers [on Friday] at Victorious,” The Last Dinner Party said in a statement.
“As a band we cannot cosign political censorship and will therefore be boycotting the festival today. As Gazans are deliberately plunged into catastrophic famine after two years of escalating violence, it is urgent and obvious that artists use their platform to draw attention to the cause.”
They added: “To see an attempt to direct attention away from the genocide in order to maintain an apolitical image is immensely disappointing.”
The band said they were “devastated to be put in this position” and apologised to those looking forward to seeing them perform, while encouraging fans to donate to a medical charity supporting Palestinians.
The Academic said they could not “in good conscience” perform at “a festival that silences free speech”. Meanwhile, Cliffords said they would refuse to play “if we are to be censored for showing our support to the people of Palestine”.
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The Mary Wallopers accused Victorious Festival’s original statement of being “misleading” and said their video “clearly shows a Victorious crew member coming on stage, interfering with our show, removing the flag from the stage and then the sound being cut following a chant of ‘Free Palestine’.
“The same crew member is later heard in the video saying ‘you aren’t playing until the flag is removed’.”
In a second statement, Victorious Festival said it did not “handle the explanation of [its] policies sensitively or far enough in advance to allow a sensible conclusion to be reached”.
It said it now accepted that the audience could not hear any comments made after the band’s mics were cut off.
“The Mary Wallopers are a fantastic band, and we were very much looking forward to their performance on Friday,” organisers said.
“We are in the business of putting on great shows, not cutting them off, and this is the last thing we wanted – for the band, their fans and ourselves.”
The statement added that the festival would make a “substantial donation to humanitarian relief efforts for the Palestinian people”.
Other artists, including Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap, pop singer Nell Mescal and Dropkick Murphys, have continued to express their support for The Mary Wallopers on Instagram.
Portsmouth News reported that Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig commented on the controversy during the band’s headline set on Saturday night.
“If someone was punished for flying a flag, that is wrong and they deserve an apology,” he said. “The terrible suffering of the Palestinian people deserves all of our sympathy.”
