Rina Sawayama Renounces Matthew Healy’s Podcast Comments During Glastonbury Set

Rina Sawayama recently performed at the Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts, where she introduced her song “STFU!” with thinly veiled words for Matthew Healy of the 1975. “Tonight, this goes out to a white man that watches Ghetto Gaggers, and mocks Asian people on a podcast,” Sawayama said. “He also owns my masters…I’ve had enough.”

Matty Healy has been criticized for an appearance on the Adam Friedland Show in February. In an interview with the hosts, he admits to having a predilection for watching pornography in which Black women are degraded and subjugated by white men; during a discussion about the rapper Ice Spice, Healy laughed as the hosts mocked Chinese, Hawaiian, and Japanese accents.

Two months after the podcast aired, Healy was removed from his position on the board of directors for Dirty Hit Limited, the private limited company behind the independent British record label Dirty Hit, where Sawayama and the 1975 are signed as artists. He had been appointed as a director in December 2018. He would later address the comments to an audience in New Zealand, saying he was “kind of a bit sorry.”