“We’d like to thank Ed Sheeran for organising this concert,” offers a member of Kneecap, one of several unannounced guests who have turned up for the first European date of Macklemore’s Free Palestine tour. It’s a characteristically two-fisted approach to the matter in hand from a band who have seldom shied away from controversy, but it has more than a grain of truth in it.
The events of the last six weeks are quite something, and perhaps not what Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, had in mind when he led efforts to pressurise Sheeran to remove Macklemore from his summer US tour, after the rapper made a speech about Palestine on stage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Macklemore was duly removed from the tour, but the rapper saw his profile rise dramatically as a result – in fairness, he was hardly unknown, but his biggest hits are a decade old – while every other artist on Sheeran’s tour quit in solidarity. Sheeran’s tour limped on amid much opprobrium, while Macklemore was able to translate the publicity into a tour of his own, in noticeably bigger venues than he played on his last European tour, with proceeds donated to organisations assisting Palestinians. Dublin’s 13,000-capacity 3Arena is sold out, as is every other date on the tour.
Accordingly, a certain infectiously giddy excitement attends the event itself: the audience receive everything – speeches from activists; video messages from actors Mark Ruffalo and Cynthia Nixon and the Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, among others; sets of Arabic-themed dance music from Palestinian American DJ Habibeats; and an appearance by longstanding political US hip-hop duo Dead Prez.
They go nuts for Lina Makoul, the first Palestinian to win the Israeli equivalent of The Voice: her brief set opens with a wordless vocal protesting censorship and ends with a song admonishing late-stage capitalism that comes complete with a glancing reference to Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle, which really isn’t what one would expect from a TV talent show winner. They receive Beoga, the County Kerry folk band who performed on Sheeran’s Galway Girl, but left the singer’s tour alongside Macklemore, like returning heroes. It turns out they’re founding members of an organisation called Irish Artists For Palestine, which does rather beg the question of what Sheeran thought they might do under the circumstances. “You don’t fuck with the Irish, lads,” offers drummer Eamon Murray.
There’s something very striking about the fact that the local artists who’ve heeded Macklemore’s call to help out are evidently committed to the cause behind it: you never get a sense of anyone rocking up in order to grab brownie points or reflected glory. Backed by a string section, Hozier’s performance is heavy on audience-pleasing hits – Take Me to Church, Too Sweet – and takes in a rendition of a remarkable 19th-century folk ballad called The Prayer of Shields, which he apparently learned from Ian Lynch of Lankum. The screens behind him display a QR code that links to a petition in support of 55 students from Gaza who have not had their visas approved to study in Ireland. He goes down a storm, but the real bedlam is caused by Kneecap, who know a thing or two about how controversy can impact an artist’s profile. Their brief set opens with a film that proceeds in a frantic blur of images – The Troubles, Sinéad O’Connor ripping up the pope’s photo on Saturday Night Live – causes an outbreak of moshing and ends with DJ Próvaí struggling to maintain his balance in the midst of the audience: it’s splenetic, chaotic and remarkably powerful.
When Macklemore finally appears, it’s hard to miss the effect of recent events upon him, not least because his opening track, Chant – a 2022 single about his struggle with addiction – now sounds remarkably like a defiant comment on them: “This is my moment … you can’t take my voice from me.” He has a point: he’s been writing about Palestine since 2024’s Hind’s Hall, but as he rolls out his old hits – Thrift Shop’s hymning of limiting one’s spending rather than splurging in grandstanding rapper style; Same Love’s backing for same-sex marriage – a fresh sense of energised purpose about his approach is hard to miss. Between songs, he assiduously shifts attention from himself to the cause he’s advocating, but notes that the show itself “makes me feel glorious”. Understandably so: he mentions that he’s “called up a lot of people in the last six weeks” and notes that Kneecap and Hozier were the first to agree to perform alongside him, which makes you wonder how successful his efforts have been elsewhere. But in Dublin at least, the Free Palestine show feels like a worthwhile triumph.
