Matty Healy has addressed the controversy he caused after kissing his male bandmate on stage in Malaysia where homosexual acts are illegal and punishable by law.
The 1975 frontman addressed the audience at the band’s show in Dallas on Monday and explained that he had been told not to speak about Malaysia but he was “p***ed off” as he read out a 10-minute-long statement from his phone.
“Unfortunately, there’s so many incredibly stupid people on the internet that I’ve just cracked. And everyone keeps telling me that you can’t talk about Malaysia, don’t talk about what happened in Malaysia, so I’m gonna talk about it at length … I am p***ed off, to be frank,” the son of former Loose Women star Denise Welch began.
He argued that 1975 didn’t “waltz into Malaysia” but were booked by festival organisers who were well aware of the band’s political views and stage show. He added that kissing his bandmate, Ross McDonald, “was not a stunt simply meant to provoke the government” but an “ongoing part of The 1975 stage show which had been performed many times prior”.
Had the band omitted any “routine part” of the show to “appease the Malaysian authorities’ bigoted views of LGBTQ people” that would’ve been “a passive endorsement of those politics”, Healy said.
“As liberals are so fond of saying, ‘silence causes violence, use your platform’ – so we did that. And that is where things got complicated,” he added.
On July 22, the Brit rock band performed on the first day of Good Vibes Festival in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Their performance was cut short however when Healy kissed bassist MacDonald while criticising the country’s anti-LGBT+ laws under which homosexual acts were illegal.
The festival was called off after the first of three planned days, with Malaysia’s government calling the band “extremely rude”. At the time, it was reported that the group will not be permitted to perform in the country again.
At the Dallas gig, Healy said he thought it was “puzzling” that “lots of people, liberal people, contended that the performance was an insensitive display of hostility against the cultural customs of the Malaysian government and that the kiss was a performative gesture of allyship”.
