JADE Disappointed in Matty Healy for being Apolitical

In an interview with The Guardian, JADE had called out The 1975’s frontman Matty Healy for choosing to be apolitical during his set at Glastonbury.

The 32-year-old, who rose to fame on The X Factor in the pop group Little Mix before launching her solo career in 2022, is a stalwart defender of LGBT+ rights and a vocal advocate for a free Palestine.

“I don’t think you can be a pop artist and cover your eyes. I saw Matty Healy say that he doesn’t want to be political, which I found disappointing,” the 32-year-old singer asserted.

Healy, 36, declared at The 1975’s headline Glastonbury set this June, “We don’t need more politics. We need more love and friendship,” Thirlwall used her performance on the Woodsies stage to protest against the Reform UK party, welfare cuts, silencing protest and selling arms.

“It’s very easy for someone who’s white and straight and very privileged to say that. Good for you, hun!” she added.

“I saw a lot of people saying, ‘Your Glastonbury set was really good until you got political’ or ‘I used to be a fan of yours until you got political.’ But, hun, you were never a fan, because I’ve always piped up,” she said.

“I was ready for a backlash from the right kind of people,” JADE fired back.

Back in 2015, JADE famously hijacked Little Mix’s Twitter account to declare that she was “truly saddened and ashamed” by parliament voting to bomb ISIL targets in Syria. “I got in a bit of trouble for that, but I felt very passionate about it,” she admitted.

“What’s quite funny is that we didn’t have individual Twitter accounts, and we each had to sign off tweets from the Little Mix account with our name. So I did my tweet about Syria and ended it with ‘xxJadexx’,” she added of her time in the pop group alongside Jesy Nelson, Perrie Edwards and Leigh-Anne Pinnock.

Healy has been far from apolitical in the past. Back in 2023, while performing at Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival, the frontman spoke out against the country’s anti-LGBT+ laws and kissed his bandmate Ross MacDonald on the mouth. The three-day festival was cancelled, and the band was banned from Malaysia.

That same year, Healy appeared to do a Nazi salute on stage during a performance of The 1975’s song “Love it If We Made It”, as he sang the lyrics: “Thank you, Kanye [West], very cool.” The rapper was embroiled in controversy over a number of antisemitic remarks at the time. Healy’s representatives did not respond to The Independent’s requests for comment over the incident.