What’s behind Saudi Arabia’s answer to Glastonbury? The power of popwashing | Michael Hann

You might believe we’re fresh from the biggest music festival in the world, what with more than 200,000 people having assembled in some fields in Somerset. We’re not.

Actually, Glastonbury is pretty much a minnow compared with the biggest music festival in the world. Soundstorm, held each December, attracts more than triple the Glastonbury crowd, but you don’t hear the headliners wanging on about what a life-changing experience it was. You don’t hear them mention it at all, to be honest. I only heard of it earlier this year, when the CEO of a big production company talked about his firm’s work on the event. The reason you don’t hear about it is that Soundstorm is held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Pop music is the lesser-known outpost of the reputation-laundering of repressive regimes. The sportswashing efforts of various Middle Eastern regimes – the Qatar World Cup, grands prix in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia’s LIV golf tour and, most visibly, the takeovers of football clubs by various sovereign wealth funds – have been pored over and criticised, but pop’s involvement in cultural reputation-laundering has been largely ignored.

In addition to Soundstorm, artists have been condemned, albeit in passing, for playing private and public concerts in repressive states. Beyoncé played for an invited audience of influencers and journalists in Dubai, UAE earlier this year, for a reported $24m fee. Homosexuality is illegal in the United Arab Emirates and considered a crime potentially punishable by death. Mariah Carey, Nelly, Janet Jackson and Future have all played shows in Saudi Arabia. Human Rights Watch has criticised the state for, among other things, the arrests of peaceful dissidents, state executions and the continuation of the male guardianship system for women (despite some reforms). It doesn’t always end this way, with Steps last week refusing to play in Dubai, after rejecting a contract clause demanding they not mention sexuality.

Pop and rock are more complicated, culturally, than sport. It’s entirely explicable that it tends only to be when artists announce their intention to play in Israel that the boos are long and hard, as fans protest against the state’s policies towards Palestinians. Pop still likes to think of itself as countercultural (despite decades of evidence to the contrary, such as numerous corporate tie-ins), so it tends to align with causes perceived as being leftwing – and there’s no firmer signifier of your leftwingness than wanting to boycott Israel in support of Palestine. But I struggle to see why, say, Michael Kiwanuka playing Soundstorm last year passed without a whisper, while any artist playing in Tel Aviv can expect to be flayed on social media.

Because of that expectation that musicians will always be on the side of the angels, and their desire to maintain their fanbase, they inevitably act in a hypocritical way. They will say the right thing, and do whatever is in their best interests. Beyoncé is a case in point: that Dubai show wasn’t her first troubling acceptance of money – she played at the Gaddafi family’s 2009 New Year’s Eve party. (The artist later revealed that she gave the complete payment and all commissions to help support earthquake relief in Haiti.) Or take the 1975, a band I think are great, who pledged in 2020 only to play festival bills with a gender-balanced lineup, yet still last year headlined Reading and Leeds, a festival criticised in 2020 for the maleness of its lineups.

But, in all honesty, I find it hard to blame them. A pop or rock star makes nothing like the money their equivalent did when I was a kid. I have one friend in a band, all of whose albums have made the top five, who headlines festivals across Europe. In the 1980s that would have bought him a country pile, a townhouse and a place in New York. In the present day it has bought him a tiny house in an insalubrious area of north-west London. For all the projection of glamour, the vast majority of musicians do not get to live “rock star” lifestyles. A very average professional footballer in the Premier League earns as much in a month as a hugely successful musician might in a year. And for all the talk of sportspeople having short careers and needing to maximise their earnings, the same is true of musicians, who also face the simple peril of going out of fashion and seeing their livelihoods evaporate.

The difference, though, is that no one thinks Cristiano Ronaldo is a hero of social justice, and nor does he make any effort to portray himself as one. Beyoncé does. All the stars who ride on the back of social justice movements and then fly off to the Arabian peninsula deserve to be criticised not for needing to make a living, but for saying one thing and doing another. In fact, that’s an age-old faultline in music, going back to the Clash being castigated by harder-line punks for “turning rebellion into money” and beyond.

Which brings us back to Steps. Whoever thought they would be the band to walk it like they talk it? There are much edgier stars who could learn from H, Claire, Faye, Lisa and Lee.

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