Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie: 'It was hard to get artists to take part in Gig for Gaza'

Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie says he tried to join Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party, but has no idea if he’s actually a member.

Speaking to Big Issue ahead of Primal Scream playing the Gig for Gaza on 17 October, and tied to his involvement in the END GENOCIDE campaign, Gillespie also said the gig’s organiser Paul Weller had struggled to get bands and venues to agree to the gig.

Taking place at London’s Troxy, the gig follows the Together for Palestine concert at Wembley, which raised £1.5 million for organisations including Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and Palestine Medical Service. The Gig for Gaza will raise funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians and Gaza Forever, and a previous gig in 2024 raised more than £125,000.

Gillespie spoke about his long-running engagement in the issue, the role musicians can play, and his struggles in trying to join a new political party.

You’re playing the Gig for Gaza and are part of the END GENOCIDE campaign. Primal Scream have also joined 400 artists, including Björk and Massive Attack, in pulling their music from streaming services in Israel. What role can musicians play? 

As cultural workers, which are really what musicians are, if you’re concerned enough about an issue you can use your platform, use your voice, withdraw your labour. Use your voice to spread counter-propaganda.

Paul [Weller] wanted to do the Gig for Gaza in Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin. He was finding it very hard to get venues to agree to the gigs. It was hard to get artists to take part in it.

If you ask me, I think most rock bands are pussies. Rock music, indie music, whatever you want to call it, doesn’t stand for anything, it doesn’t represent anything, it doesn’t speak for anything. It’s solipsistic, it’s very Thatcherite. It’s very concerned with the individual rather than the mass.

It’s very few people speaking out about anything. Whereas rappers, actors, actresses, speak it all the time. A lot of the pop artists, the girls are speaking out, Dua Lipa, Shirley Manson from Garbage. But they’re exceptions rather than the rule. When you see people in the 90s that came up at the same time as us, in performances, none of them say it. They’re silent on this issue. [Note: Radiohead’s Thom Yorke released a statement on Israel’s war in Gaza condemning both Benjamin Netanyahu and his “crew of extremists”, while also condemning Hamas.]

People might see taking music off streaming services in Israel as punishing ordinary people in Israel. How would you respond to that?

The ordinary people in Israel keep voting in right-wing governments, or even so-called centrist governments. Nothing changes on the ground in Palestine. Gaza has now been demolished, bombed out of existence.

Israel is like South Africa, an apartheid state exists. But people in Israel can have this lovely life, only because they live in an apartheid state. Jewish Israelis have more rights than Arab Israelis. In 2018 they put that into law. [In 2018, the Israeli government’s passage of the “Basic Law” act characterising the country as a Jewish state led to complaints from Arab Israelis that they are ‘second-class citizens’]. A brutal occupation is what guarantees the peace, the western-style lifestyle that people in Israel have.

Even bishop Desmond Tutu described the plight of the Palestinians under the Israelis as worse than the black South Africans under the Boers, under the white South African apartheid regime.

As cultural workers, all we have is the power to withdraw labour.

In the same way that if I was going into a TV studio, for example, and the cleaners were having a strike because they were being exploited and they said please don’t cross the picket line. I wouldn’t cross the picket line.

What do you think of the Kneecap prosecution as a musician?

It’s ludicrous. 

Because their profile is so big, and they were doing it internationally at Coachella and stuff, and they were building up a huge international following of young people who were also calling it genocide. Mr Starmer and his cohort are trying to make an example of Kneecap to silence them, and also anybody else that feels they should use their platform to speak out.

What do you think of Keir Starmer?

Starmer and Morgan McSweeney have no real politics, no imagination, they don’t believe in anything. They’re now in power and they don’t know what to do with it.

Maybe the best thing to do is form a party outside the Labour Party. The Labour Party was formed to give the working man a voice in parliament, and it doesn’t give the working man a voice any more. It jettisoned the working man in the 90s.

Have you joined Your Party?

I think I did. When they announced it, I tried to join online. I never got anything back that said I was a member. I never gave any money, because they never asked for any money. I just said yeah I’d like to join, but I never received anything back from them, so I don’t know.

The fact that as many as 100,000 people applied for membership is fantastic. There’s a need for a proper socialist party in the country. There’s millions of people that feel like me, that the country’s in a mess. We might see a more fair country. We want to fight against the forces of reaction.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Reader-funded since 1991 – Big Issue brings you trustworthy journalism that drives real change.

Every day, our journalists dig deeper, speaking up for those society overlooks.

Could you help us keep doing this vital work? Support our journalism from £5 a month.