June 30, 2024 - 3:47pm

The two most bourgeois events in the social calendar — London’s Pride parade and Glastonbury — often coincide. This at least gets them both over and done with tout suite, and removes a small but very disproportionately vocal and culturally powerful layer of the upper-middle-class, away from the rest of us for one blissful weekend.

There is always some defining, desperately cringe, spectacle to emerge from these events. It looked like Glastonbury’s entry this year was to be its inauguration of a “lesbian tent” that was actually full of delusional straight blokes. But that, incredible thought it was, was swiftly superseded by Banksy’s boat.

This was an inflatable model of the kind of inflatable dinghy that regularly crosses the English Channel, complete with inflatable kiddies aboard. It was released onto the crowd, which were appreciating the performance by pop group Idles of their song “Danny Nedelko”, a hymn to open borders which contains the lyrics “My blood brother is an immigrant, a beautiful immigrant” and “He’s made of bones, he’s made of blood/He’s made of flesh, he’s made of love/He’s made of you, he’s made of me/Unity!” Stand back, T.S. Eliot.

The kitsch of Banksy and the cringe of Idles are made for each other: luxury goods for luxury beliefs. The group’s singer Joe Talbot then encouraged the crowd to chant “Fuck the King!”, which he called “the new British national anthem”. Edgy stuff, if you’re 12 years old. Talbot is almost 40.

There is always a market for an iteration of this band. In my time we’ve had S*M*A*S*H, Sleaford Mods, Crass, Manic Street Preachers, New Model Army, Reverend & The Makers — by and for angry middle-class boys, and all fairly indistinguishable. There’s always one on the way to replace the previous one — a terrible chain of the pompous and hectoring shouting of vaguely Leftist-sounding clichés, set against a backdrop of metallic bashing. Punk or metal or hardcore techno with all the fun and sex and humour of those genres drained out of them.

Banksy fits in with Idles nicely. For those of us of a certain age, the name is forever connected with Banksy, the love rival of Zammo in mid-Eighties Grange Hill, a youth with a face that you could politely describe as characterful. The actual Banksy is an ex-public schoolboy called Robin Gunningham, a fact which everybody has to pretend they have forgotten. The posh art world values his gruesome “that’ll show Thatcher!” novelty graffiti, because of course it would, and his works have become bankable assets.

I like to think that Banksy is sat back laughing all the way to the bank, soaking these people for the fools that they are, but there remains the disquieting thought that perhaps he really means it, man. Either way, this is the height of phoney rebellion, safely corralled and contained, utterly predictable and pointless — and notable only for its mortifying vacuousness.


Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.

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