Irish folk band The Mary Wallopers say they were muted at a music festival in Portsmouth, England on Friday for displaying a Palestinian flag during their set, something denied by organizers.
“Just got cut off at Victorious festival for having a Palestinian flag on the stage,” the band said in a post on Instagram. “We’ve been doing this for six years now and this has never happened before.”
“Free Palestine all day every day.”
The festival organizers denied the band’s account, saying event management had cut the sound after the band “used a chant which is widely understood to have a discriminatory context.”
“Although a flag was displayed on stage contrary to our policy, and this was raised with the artist’s crew, the show was not ended at this point, and it was the artist’s decision to stop the song,” the festival statement said. “The decision by the event management to cut the sound and end the performance was only taken after the band used a chant which is widely understood to have a discriminatory context.”
CNN has approached the band and the festival for further details.
Edited video from the concert posted by the band on Instagram show that the Mary Wallopers’ banjo player Andrew Hendy began the set by saying “Free Palestine, and f**k Israel” before the group launched into one of their songs.
Their playing continues for about a minute further, according to the video, when a stagehand appears to come on stage and remove a Palestinian flag that the band had affixed to one of its speakers.
Andrew Hendy tells the crowd that the band were instructed not to fly a Palestinian flag or they would be cut off, encouraging audience members to leave the festival grounds. The banjo player began chanting “Free Palestine” before his mic was cut.
Later, video from another angle shows the band’s guitarist Charles Hendy asking a person offscreen whether the band will be allowed to continue playing. The response is muffled, but the person appears to reply that the Palestinian flag needs to be removed.
“We’re not playing,” Charles Hendy responds.
“Fine,” the person offscreen says.
As the band waved to the crowd and left the stage, audience members began chanting “Free Palestine” and “Let them play!”
“People were upset and angry,” said Emma Gaynor, an audience member who attended the concert with her partner. “I didn’t hear anything discriminatory, it all happened very quickly.”
Jess Huxham, another attendee, said that other bands who played the festival that day had also said “Free Palestine” during their sets.
“From all I heard,” Huxham said in an email. “[The Mary Wallopers] did say ‘Free Palestine,’ which other bands on the main stage had said before their set.”
The incident comes amid fierce controversy around pro-Palestinian activism and free speech in the UK, with musicians often at the forefront.
After rap duo Bob Vylan chanted “Death to the IDF” at their Glastonbury Festival set in June, police in the UK launched a criminal investigation. Even the United States government weighed in, revoking the band members’ visas ahead of their US tour.