Singer Jade Thirlwall has criticised Matty Healy after The 1975 frontman recently declared he didn’t want his band’s legacy “to be one of politics”.
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.
While 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.
“I don’t think you can be a pop artist and cover your eyes,” Thirlwall told The Guardian in a new interview, adding that she found Healy’s decision to be publicly apolitical a “disappointing” move. “It’s very easy for someone who’s white and straight and very privileged to say that. Good for you, hun!” she said.
Back in 2015, Thirlwall 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.
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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.
The frontman told fans at Glastonbury this year that The 1975 had since made a “conscious decision” to become politically neutral in their forthcoming performances. “We honestly don’t want our legacy to be one of politics,” he said. “We don’t need more politics. We need more love and friendship.”
Thirlwall, who grew up in South Shields, said she and her mother faced “so many microaggressions” and “people calling us the P-word” that she eventually became desensitised to the racism until the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 prompted her and her family to confront the trauma of their experiences.
“In that moment we had to be like, actually it’s not OK for people to call us those things,” she said. “My mam had to confront people she’d known most of her life. The right people apologise and better themselves, and you get rid of the wrong people. It was a big change for us.”
Thirlwall rose to fame on The X Factor alongside her Little Mix bandmates in 2011. They were the first and only girl group to win the series and went on to release hits including “Wings” and “Black Magic”.
Following the band’s decision to pursue solo projects, Thirlwall released her debut single “Angle of My Dreams” to critical acclaim in July 2024. She was subsequently awarded Best Pop Act of the year at the 2025 BRIT Awards.
