Good Vibes festival announces return after controversy with 1975

Malaysia’s Good Vibes festival will return this summer following an incident last year when the event was disrupted during filming of The 1975. Frontman Matty Healy harshly criticized the country’s anti-LGBTQ+ stance on stage during the three-day Kuala Lumpur festival, leading to the cancellation of the next two days.

“I’m sorry if this offends you and you’re religious and this is part of your fucking government, but your government is a bunch of fucking retards and I don’t care,” Healy told the audience. “If you push, I’ll push back.” I’m not in the fucking mood.

After the show’s seventh song, “I Couldn’t Be More in Love”, the concert was abruptly interrupted, with Healy telling the audience that they “just got banned from Kuala Lumpur”. In a statement, Good Vibes festival organizers confirmed that the 1975 concert was cut short due to “failure to comply with local performance guidelines.”

The following day, organizers said Healy’s “controversial conduct and remarks” had prompted Malaysia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital to issue an “immediate cancellation directive”, forcing the festival to close. The 1975 also announced that they would cancel the remainder of their Asian tour.

This year’s Good Vibes Festival will take place on July 20 and 21 at Resorts World Awana in Genting Highlands, Malaysia and will feature performances by J. Balvin, Peggy Gou, Joji, BIBI, Alec Benjamin and many more . Wan Alman, Entertainment Director of Future Sound Asia, spoke with NME on the return, but could not comment specifically on The 1975 due to ongoing legal proceedings with the band. He noted that the controversy was “pretty much an isolated incident” in the festival’s history.

“Despite what happened last year, the government was actually supportive,” Alman said. “They want to work with us hand in hand to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again and that the live music and festival industries aren’t affected by what happened.”

He continued: “We have been working with government authorities through workshops with PUSPAL (Central Committee for Filming and Performance Applications of Foreign Artists) to develop (Standing Operating Procedures) to deal with incidents such as what happened last year, and also refine and improve the PUSPAL guidelines. The good thing is that the Good Vibes Festival is not banned, so we are repeating it this year.

Alman explained that the reservation process has become more careful. “If anything, it would have made promoters more cautious about which acts they want to book and probably made them more diligent in clearly informing artists that these are the things you can and cannot do when performing in Malaysia “, did he declare.

Following The 1975’s chaotic performance, which resulted in legal action against the group by Future Sound Asia, the Good Vibes Festival was unsure if it could continue. But Alman said they decided to extend it to two days and change locations for 2024.

“We are not going to let this serious incident ruin everything we have worked for,” he said. NME. “We worked too hard for this. That’s when we decided to launch Good Vibes 2024, but at that time we didn’t know in what form. We were still going through various iterations of what we could make work.

It is now common knowledge that concerts in Malaysia trigger what is known as a “circuit breaker” for artists, meaning the entire production can be stopped with a single button. In November, he was on the line at Coldplay’s concert at the National Stadium in Kuala Lumpur for offending cultural sensitivities. NME asked Alman about the kill switch, which he said “still hasn’t been standardized” and “every promoter and organizer has their own version of it.”

“For us, the kill switch is a system that allows us to immediately cut off the audio, video and lights on the stage,” he said. “Of course it is always a nuclear option, it is the very last resort. We have other protocols in place regarding who can request the scene to be closed and when we can request it. We’re not going to demand it if a performer starts smoking a cigarette on stage; we’re just going to stop them and tell them they can’t do that. There will be different scenarios and degrees of severity, and what happened last year would be the most serious, the one where we cut everything. »