Bobby Vylan last graced the news pages in 2021, thanks to an incident that saw him halt a gig in Norwich to launch a foul-mouthed tirade at a blameless young woman in the audience.
Sarah Corbett, 20, told reporters how the punk and grime singer had taken umbrage at a cube of ice being thrown on to the stage of the University of East Anglia’s student’s union, midway through his performance, and wrongly assumed she was the culprit.
‘He started abusing me through the microphone,’ she said. ‘As I tried to leave, one of his fans grabbed me by the throat.’
The petty, if somewhat unedifying, altercation left Corbett, who was hitherto a fan of the modish performer, feeling both ‘humiliated’ and ‘furious’.
Fast forward almost four years, and we can safely say that she’s not alone when it comes to fury.
In the hours after his set at Glastonbury, Vylan’s antics were condemned by everyone from Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, along with half the Israeli cabinet. Avon and Somerset Police are reviewing videos of the performance. Yet upsetting lots of people was, perhaps, his exact intention. For in the urban music scene, notoriety sells. And in the six years his act Bob Vylan has been in existence, its shtick has revolved almost entirely around making (sometimes puerile) efforts to provoke controversy.
The duo’s first major festival, Reading, saw lead singer Bobby – his partner, a percussionist, is confusingly named Bobbie Vylan – take to the stage wearing a tattered Union flag, while yelling ‘this country’s in need of a good f***ing spanking’ and ‘Kill the queen! She killed Diana!’
On their debut at Glastonbury, in 2022, they sang a ditty about the Thatcher government: ‘F*** that, let’s go dig up Maggie’, went one verse. ‘Let’s dig up Maggie’s grave.’
Vylan’s antics were condemned by everyone from Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy
In the six years his act Bob Vylan has been in existence, its shtick has revolved almost entirely around making efforts to provoke controversy
To the backdrop of a Palestinian flag, Bobby Vylan of British duo Bob Vylan performs on the West Holts Stage
The targets of Vylan’s invective are, to this end, an entirely predictable checklist of the sort of people and institutions that the modern Left abhors.
They range from the UK – there’s ‘nothing great about Great Britain’, he says – to the Royal Family, who he calls ‘the thieves in the palace’, to anyone who happens to own a buy-to-let property, about whom he sings ‘Landlord just raised your rent – mate, get yourself a gun.’
In Bobby Vylan’s world, takeaway restaurant owners are not enterprising businessmen who offer employment and create wealth, but exploitative charlatans who deliberately harm their customers. ‘The killing of kids with £2 chicken and chips/ Is a tactic of war, waged on the poor,’ goes another song.
Despite this claim, the band is, with somewhat flagrant hypocrisy, the holder of a financial interest in the food industry: it sells an own-brand variety of vegan hot sauce called ‘Burn Britannia’. Of little surprise, given his attitude to Israel, is the fact the group regards Sir Winston Churchill, who did as much as anyone to prevent the Jewish people being wiped out by the Nazi regime, as an evil colonialist who people wrongly ‘feel they have to revere’.
Equally inevitable is the fact Vylan has been championed from the start of his career by the BBC, who decided to broadcast Saturday’s display of casual and vile anti-Semitism into the nation’s homes. He appears to have first crossed our national broadcaster’s radar after being asked to perform at the Black and Asian Police Association conference in Manchester in 2005, at the age of just 14. And, in 2007, BBC Suffolk described him as an ‘established performance poet’.
Back then, Vylan, who is now 34, had yet to create his current stage moniker. Instead, he performed under his real name: Pascal Robinson-Foster.
‘Pascal believes that poetry can have a powerful message,’ read the BBC introduction to an interview with him. ‘He tells us about his influences and why he loves slam poetry.’
The grandson of a Windrush immigrant, who was raised in Ipswich, Robinson-Foster’s background was not without connections. Indeed, his family has links to hip-hop royalty. A godfather is Ricky Martin Lloyd Walters, the multi-millionaire Anglo-American rapper and record producer better known as Slick Rick, who is famed for his ostentatious diamond-encrusted jewellery.
The grandson of a Windrush immigrant, who was raised in Ipswich, Robinson-Foster’s background was not without connections
Vylan has been championed from the start of his career by the BBC, who decided to broadcast Saturday’s display of casual and vile anti-Semitism into the nation’s homes
His family has links to hip-hop royalty, a godfather is Ricky Martin Lloyd Walters, better known as Slick Rick (pictured)
In an early interview, Robinson-Foster claimed his passion for music came from ‘growing up in a boring place’, saying ‘people either played football, dabbled in illegal activity or rapped… and I never liked football’.
By his early 20s, he was performing as a grime artist named Nee-Hi, who was dubbed ‘The Fresh Prince of Ipswich’ by the music Press ‘for his energetic performances and old-school style.’ Nee-Hi released an album in 2012, around the time Robinson-Foster had a daughter, who is now a teenager, but subsequently dropped off the radar. He began performing as Bobby Vylan in 2019.
Teaming up with Bobbie, whose real name is unknown, the duo built a following via their ability to ‘evoke the spirit of classic anti-establishment punk, fusing it with the rebelliousness of grime, a genre that has evolved into a voice of some of London’s most repressed communities,’ according to an interview with the Irish Times in 2019.
Discussing their desire to spark political controversy, Bobby told the newspaper: ‘You have Stormzy, for example, performing at Glastonbury at the main stage in a stab-proof vest with the Union Jack on it. That’s a political statement. But now you look at punk music and it’s not what it once was.’
Despite quickly building a following on the live music circuit, Bob Vylan’s music was initially rejected by record labels, who found them ‘too extreme’ to sign. And Bobby’s bitterness at the music industry continues to this day. At Glastonbury on Saturday, he took a pop at a Jewish music company executive who appears to have signed a petition against Kneecap, the controversial Irish group scheduled to perform after the duo.
‘Recently a list was released of people trying to stop our mates Kneecap from performing here today. And who do I see on that f****** list, but that bald-headed c*** I used to f****** work for. So look, we have done it all, from working in bars to working for f****** Zionists.’
In the past, reviews have waxed lyrical about their ‘notoriously lively’ stage shows ‘with pictures online even showing Bobby Vylan crowd surfing with his genitals exposed’. Others have praised his combative way with hecklers. At a recent gig in Manchester, he told a heckler ‘I tell you what – buy a ticket to the show at the Ritz, I’ll f****** meet you outside and punch you there, you d***head.’
Now Vylan has picked a fight with an entire country, not to mention the British Government. But it may come at a cost. In a couple of months, he’s due to perform a series of lucrative gigs in the US. But whether Donald Trump’s immigration service will now allow him across the border is anyone’s guess.
