Of the hundred or so policemen who’ve turned out for Bob Vylan in Kentish Town, most are flanking the Israel protest across the road while the Palestine one seems a little more self-contained. Banners bearing Trump slogans, St George crosses and Union Jacks are nestled amid stars of David and placards saying “No Jew hate”. At the head of the crowd, a black British emcee is playing “Lion in Zion” by Bob Marley; he segues into “God Save the King”, the Israeli national anthem and then, curiously, the Benny Hill theme tune.
The chant goes, “Yes! Yes! to the IDF!” Then suddenly, it is over. “We’re going to leave the lowlifes to do their vile little show. See you again on 29 November [the next national march for Palestine in London], when we will clean the trash again. Enjoy little Pascal Robinson’s show…” Flags are folded neatly away out of respect for the Met. A harried steward, dealing with huge crowds behind the venue, orders, “Anyone with balcony tickets, line up against the wall.” A man in a smoking cap laughs: “What, are we going to get shot?”
Pascal Robinson-Foster – Bobby Vylan – takes the stage very late, as stars do, with his drummer, Bobbie Vylan, behind him. He is dressed in blinding white and announces that he will start the show with “light stretching and meditation” (Bobby is a vegan). He touches his toes, reaches high to the sky, then raises his left arm parallel to his body, places his right over his heart, and lifts his knees – one-two, one-two – while executing small turns to demonstrate his march from side to side.
The Manchester Evening News (MEN) recently interpreted this as a Nazi salute, but settled a legal threat from the band. On 1 November the MEN published an apology, accepting the duo’s explanation that the moves were, in fact, “a sun salutation”, and part of a “guided light stretching and meditation” routine at the start of all their shows. Bobby Vylan will sue anyone else who says otherwise, he says on stage in Kentish Town.
He is very effective at evoking an atmosphere and then turning away from it – not by straight denial, but with superiority, mild threat and Socratic reasoning: What do YOU think of what I just did? He is organised and endlessly self-referencing: his onstage chat constantly reminds the audience of the various media high points from his tumultuous year. “Is there anyone here who knew who we were before June 28?” he grins, referencing the Glastonbury performance that severed his ties with the BBC. There is a rather gauche moment when he says, “You might have heard me say this on the Louis Theroux podcast…” Bobby does his own PR. He recalls the moment he said he does not feel at home in the UK and considers himself pan-African.
A portion of the audience, overwhelmingly white, are many pints in and turned on by hate – hate as a subversive energy, rather than any real violence, you suspect. It is this section of the crowd, not the duo, who reprise the “Death to the IDF” chant from Glastonbury several times, and the majority of the audience join in; the girls up on the balcony behind me are doing it too – a sort of pantomime chant. Vylan never joins in, but he is grinning from ear to ear. He told Theroux he wrote those words because “End the IDF” isn’t a rhyme. Some of his songs are brilliant, such as “We Live Here” from 2020, about racism in a pre-Reform Britain, or “Manly Man”, for which he makes all the women come down to the front. But most of the songs have the same rhythm, and he basically performs with a backing track – a sort of karaoke – which may need a little fleshing out if he is going to stay in the game.
Vylan is charismatic, both on stage and in interviews: he’d have a great voice for Shakespeare. I agree with everything he says about unconscious bias and the psychology of racism – that he’s an easier villain than Kneecap because he’s black. But there is something petulant and self-pitying about his response to the controversy he has stoked, and it is starting to grate. One of the few pop stars from Ipswich, he is at pains to place himself in the lineage of great rappers such as Chuck D (a friend) and Ice-T. He has said that his task – to bring positive change – is no different from what Nina Simone and Curtis Mayfield were doing. You suspect that he wants out of his present pariah state and into the rap elite – who wouldn’t? – but he isn’t sure what that path looks like. Meanwhile, as with so much in our political culture, there is the figurehead, and there is the power of the crowd and the unconscious forces they are releasing. At the moment, that is the source of his stardom.
[Further reading: The miracles of Rosalía]
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