Noel Gallagher takes aim at ‘woke’ Glastonbury

Glastonbury – the UK’s premier music festival – has for some time been a byword for insufferable, right-on posturing. Even so, the antics on stage this year were off the scale.

The middle classes’ favourite graffiti artist, Banksy, launched an inflatable dinghy (complete with dummies of refugees) into a crowd of festival-goers. Blur frontman Damon Albarn proclaimed from the stage: ‘Are you pro-Palestine? Do you feel that’s an unfair war?’

Noel Gallagher, Oasis legend and unrepentant truth-teller, has had enough. Speaking to the Sun about his experience of last week’s festival, he didn’t pull any punches – and even seemed to take aim at old arch-rival Albarn:

‘It’s getting a bit woke now, that place, and a bit kind of preachy and a bit virtue-signalling. I don’t like it in music – little fucking idiots waving flags around and making political statements and bands taking the stage and saying, “Hey guys, isn’t war ­terrible, yeah? Let’s all boo war. Fuck the Tories, man”, and all that…

‘Let’s just say, for instance, the world is in a bit of a fucked-up place… what’s all the kids in a field at Glastonbury going to do about it? Everybody knows what’s going on in the fucking world, you’ve got a phone in your pocket that tells you anyway. What is the point of virtue-signalling?’

You can read the full, righteous skewering here.

Thomas Osborne is an editorial assistant at spiked.