Bob Vylan are a disgrace to punk

Until recently, I was blissfully ignorant of Bob Vylan. A friend namechecked them while we were at the Forever Now festival in Milton Keynes, describing them as ‘somewhere between punk and hip-hop’. With the band having generated endless headlines, and a gig in Manchester slated for next month, I made a mental note to catch up. After all, punk was a big part of my misspent youth.

Eventually, I endured the livestream of their Glastonbury set, complete with chants of ‘Death to the IDF’ from the crowd and an anecdote about a ‘Zionist’ music industry figure. I also saw a clip from their Amsterdam gig last month, during which fans were encouraged to jeer at Charlie Kirk’s death.

This isn’t the punk spirit I was inspired by. I cannot recall any first-wave punk musician celebrating somebody’s death from the stage, or encouraging the crowd to chant for fatalities. The Sex Pistols offered up satirical visions of a rotten system – not calls for violence. The Clash may have sung about a ‘White Riot’, but when asked they told fans to channel their anger into something creative. Some bands toyed with nihilism, though the music chiefly existed to galvanise the audience out of inertia. Bob Vylan’s performances are a far cry from that spirit.

It would be remiss, however, to say that we’re facing an entirely new beast. That racket, the chant-along slogans, this whipping up of a crowd of true believers to frenzies of loathing – I recognise all of this. But back in the day, it was artists on the right leading the chant, not the left.

The band I’m reminded of most is Skrewdriver: the notorious white-power skinheads who performed to their fascist audience with passionate intensity. In the early 1980s, they were recognised almost universally as a jolly bad thing.

For those who are too young to know, Skrewdriver were the flagship act of Rock Against Communism – a movement pushing white supremacy, forced repatriation and ethno-nationalism. They played a grating strain of heavy-metal punk, with vocals growled out by ultra-nationalist Lancastrian frontman Ian Stuart Donaldson.

The initial version of the band, formed in the late 1970s, was considered vaguely acceptable. Skrewdriver released a halfway decent hooligan punk album on Chiswick Records. After a split and reformation with new members, Donaldson brought out the single, ‘White Power’, in 1983. The title tells you all you need to know. All hell broke loose in the music press, and the band were banished from mainstream venues and labels. Their gigs were advertised only through whisper networks.

Donaldson’s songs titles – including ‘Blood and Honour’ and ‘Hail the New Dawn’ – were blatantly fascistic. Their audience were boneheaded zealots. The band and its fans regularly got into violent altercations with anti-fascist groups. Donaldson himself spent 12 months at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for a racist attack at King’s Cross station. Skrewdriver were exiled to corners of nowhere, hounded by activists and the state, their music beyond the social pale.

On YouTube, you can see clips of Skrewdriver playing in Germany in 1993. Between choking out the songs, Donaldson praises the murderer of South African ANC activist Chris Hani. He dedicates his song to Hani’s killer, Janusz Waluś, ‘who exterminated a piece of shit’.

Fast forward 32 years, and we have Bob Vylan, or Pascal Robinson-Foster and Wade Laurence George, stoking their audience with a rant about Charlie Kirk’s assasination. ‘Rest in peace Charlie Kirk, you piece of shit’, Robinson-Foster signs off gleefully. Though the subject is different, the tone is strikingly alike.

Now, it will be objected that Skrewdriver were virulently racist, and Bob Vylan are not. Yet even the BBC’s own complaints unit admits that the now infamous Glastonbury set could ‘fairly be characterised as anti-Semitic’. At the gig in Amsterdam, Robinson-Foster said: ‘Fuck the fascists, fuck the Zionists. Go find them in the streets.’ Does he know the majority of British Jews are Zionists?

Quite how Bob Vylan’s predominantly ‘progressive’, middle-class fans fail to spot the bile that is coming from this band is anyone’s guess. Their bigotry may be dressed in anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist rhetoric – and may be uttered by a vegan – but it is still bigotry nonetheless. The failure to condemn it is shameful.

James Martin Charlton is an English playwright and director. Follow him on X @jmc_fire.