Rock

Matty Healy can do it all. In the span of one show in Dublin on Wednesday night (June 7) at St. Anne’s Park, the lead singer of The 1975 managed to play two sets in the same night, take a wild swing at a musical hero while also expressing his love for him and he capped it off with a subtle humble brag about nice gifts he got from two of the world’s biggest rock stars.
Let’s start with the diss, though. As you might recall, while promoting his band’s new album, Council Skies recently, High Flying Birds leader and former Oasis co-founder Noel Gallagher was asked about Healy’s comments earlier this year begging for a Gallagher brothers reunion. As with all talk of an Oasis rapprochement, this angered Noel, who referred to Matty as a “f–king slack-jawed f–kwit.”

So, after opening for his own band with a solo “Matty” set after Caroline Polachek unexpectedly pulled out of the Dublin show due to reported vocal issues with a set of stripped-down 1975 songs and a cover of former Men At Work singer Colin Hay’s “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,” Healy got to work.

Matty addressed the crowd by casually noting that he recently got some very nice gifts from U2 singer Bono and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. “Today — honestly, this is not a namedrop, this is a celebration of them as people — Chris Martin and Bono have sent us the most beautiful messages, packages, kind of good wishes,” he said, without explaining why his fellow frontmen had reached out. “In honestly such a genuine way and it made us feel so beautiful.”

The singer — who reportedly recently split with short-term girlfriend Taylor Swift after a brief dalliance — then turned his attention to the Gallaghers and gave the battling brothers a taste of their own acid-drenched medicine. “Noel Gallagher called me a ‘slack-jawed f–kwit’… I love Noel Gallagher,” Healy said, before he began turning the knife and dragging former Oasis singer Liam Gallagher into the muck as we;;. “We asked Liam to open up and he said he would have done it but he was busy.”

And then it got real.

“But I love Noel Gallagher… He’s just getting on,” Healy snarked. “The difference between me and Noel is that I do a series of interviews to promote an album, whereas he does an album to promote a series of interviews.”

And in the final twist of the knife, Healy tripled down on his call for a long-desired Oasis reunion, adding, “But we love you, Noel. Get Oasis back together!”

Check out a fan video of the Healy moment below.

The Biden administration is weighing in on the controversy over Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, saying his recent performances in Germany were antisemitic, an assessment shared by many in Israel and the pro-Israel community.
The State Department said Tuesday (June 6) that Waters has “a long track record of using antisemitic tropes” and a concert he gave late last month in Germany “contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust.”

The comments came in a written response to a question posed at Monday’s State Department press briefing about whether the administration agreed with criticism of Rogers from the U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt.

“Special Envoy Lipstadt’s quote-tweet speaks for itself,” the department said.

“The concert in question, which took place in Berlin, contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust,” the department said. “The artist in question has a long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.”

In a May 24 tweet after the concert in Berlin, during which Waters appeared on stage in a costume reminiscent of Nazi-era Germany, Lipstadt denounced the musician by echoing comments from EU antisemitism envoy Katharina von Schnurbein, who is German.

“I wholeheartedly concur with @EUAntisemitism ’s condemnation of Roger Waters and his despicable Holocaust distortion,” Lipstadt wrote in reply to a tweet from von Schnurbein.

Von Schnurbein had taken issue with Waters’ performance in Berlin as well as his previous comments related to Israel and the Holocaust.

“I am sick & disgusted by Roger Waters’ obsession to belittle and trivialize the Shoah & the sarcastic way in which he delights in trampling on the victims, systematically murdered by the Nazis,” von Schnurbein wrote. “In Germany. Enough is enough.”

Shortly after the concert, police in Berlin said they had opened an investigation of Waters on suspicion of incitement over the costume he wore. Images on social media showed Waters firing an imitation machine gun while dressed in a long black coat with a red armband. Police confirmed that the costume could constitute a glorification, justification or approval of Nazi rule and therefore a disturbance of the public peace.

Waters rejected those accusations in a statement on Facebook and Instagram, saying “the elements of my performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice, and bigotry in all its forms.”

He claimed that ”attempts to portray those elements as something else are disingenuous and politically motivated.” Waters has also drawn the ire of the pro-Israel community for his outspoken support of the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israel.