Amyl & The Sniffers spoke up about Palestine and slammed J.K. Rowling and Donald Trump at Reading Festival 2025.
While taking a break in between tracks, frontwoman Amy Taylor addressed the crowd and touched on a few topics she felt were important to speak up about.
She said: “I want to say fuck J.K. Rowling, and I want to say my heart is with the people in Palestine. It takes nothing to think about that kind of thing and talk about that kind of thing, and any kind of action is some kind of action. What else can I say? I guess fuck Trump, haha! That’s it, and I’ll leave it at that.”
Amyl & The Sniffers were not the only act to speak out about political issues at Reading 2025. Enter Shikari used their Reading Festival 2025 set to call out the “atrocity” in Gaza.
Frontman Rou Reynolds told the crowd that, back in 2010, he was beginning to learn about the situation in the region, and how Israel “treated Palestinians like second-class citizens. It subjected them to constant intimidation, humiliation, subjugation, and forced them to live in what was often described as an open-air prison,” he said.
“That was 15 years ago. We’ve all seen just how fucking horrific things we’ve got now. We’ve seen the firepower equivalent of six Hiroshima atomic bombs dropped on Gaza in the last two years, every single school and university destroyed. Almost 300 journalists murdered.”
Elsewhere, Hozier used his set at Reading to address the situation in Gaza, as well as Palestine Action, Kneecap, free speech and equality, telling the crowd: “Safety and security for everybody in the Middle East means seeing a Palestine that’s free from occupation, that’s free from these cycles of genocide and violence, and it means seeing a Palestine that’s free to move towards meaningful self-determination and statehood.”
Bring Me The Horizon waved Palestine flags from the stage for the closing track ‘Throne’ in their set, which NME awarded five stars in a review.
Meanwhile, artists have boycotted Victorious Festival after The Mary Wallopers’ set was cut short for displaying a Palestinian flag. On Friday (August 22), the Irish band were halfway through their opening song at the Portsmouth festival when their sound was cut by festival organisers and the Palestine flag on stage with them was taken away. As the crowd started to boo, the band led a chant of “free, free Palestine”.
The Mary Wallopers updated fans on Saturday with an Instagram post reading: “Yesterday, a famine was declared in Gaza, where at least 65 people were killed by Israeli attacks, all the while Israel pushed ahead with plans to split the West Bank in two. These are the important facts about yesterday.”
Alongside an unedited video of their set being cut short, they added: “The festival have released a misleading statement to the press claiming they cut our sound because of a discriminatory chant and not the band’s call to Free Palestine.
“Our 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’.”
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