Ed Sheeran’s former band Beoga say singer’s Macklemore decision will ‘follow him around’

Beoga, Ed Sheeran’s former band who quit his tour after Macklemore was dropped for making pro-Palestinian remarks on stage, have claimed that the singer’s decision will “follow him around”.

The Irish band were among the acts to withdraw from the US leg of Sheeran’s Loop tour in September in support of the “Thrift Shop” rapper and people of Palestine.

Returning to stage after the scandal, Sheeran tearfully said that his friends and family had “abandoned” him after “one of the worst weeks of my life”.

Speaking in their first major interview, Beoga members Eamon Murray and Niamh Dunne told The Irish Times that they hadn’t “fallen out” with Sheeran, but that it was important to “hold your friends accountable… whether it’s Ed Sheeran or your mad neighbour”.

Bodhrán player Murray theorised that Sheeran will have had “counsel coming from 100 places”, and that his stance would go on to haunt him.

“People will remember that’s the position we took and they’ll remember that Ed took that position. That will follow him around. He will have to wrestle with that,” he said.

“My position has been to Ed and anybody, you can say whatever you want; if you don’t take action, it doesn’t matter. You can make 100 statements. But if you don’t cancel the shows, it doesn’t matter what you say if you don’t do anything... We should all be able to freely and openly stand up and say ‘Free Palestine’. We support a free Palestine.”

Announcing their decision to withdraw from the tour in the days that followed, Beoga wrote on Instagram that “to play in venues that silence anyone advocating for a Free Palestine is not an option for us”.

“The decision to stand up for free speech and the right to speak about Palestine was a very easy decision for us as a band to make,” Dunne said. “The professional and financial stakes are very real.”

Murray echoed: “A friend of mine said, when we knew we were going to be put in an awkward position, ‘Courage can’t see around a corner.’

“In terms of the material cost to us all, nobody thought about that at the time. It’s since then that you think about it and go, ‘Okay, right.’ But you’d torture yourself if you thought about all the things that were going to come.”

Things kicked off in September after “Same Love” musician Macklemore announced that he had been dropped as the support act for the remainder of Sheeran’s US tour dates.

Macklemore claimed that the singer told him that Robert Kraft — the CEO of Kraft Group who owns Gillette Stadium — had personally called to say that he would not be allowed to perform at the venue.

Sheeran responded with his own lengthy public statement saying that he would not be drawn into a public debate about the Gaza war and that the decision to remove Macklemore was “the promoter’s decision”.

Following this, Irish acts Beoga and Aaron Rowe, the Danish band Lukas Graham, and Billie Eilish’s brother Finneas all individually announced on Instagram that they were withdrawing from the tour.

On stage in Philadelphia, Sheeran told his fans: “I’ve had to take and make difficult decisions, and I am making mistakes. I’m so, so sorry. I don’t want to disappoint fans. I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division; about humanity, not politics.”

He continued: “But this is a humanitarian issue. I cannot hide how I feel about it anymore. What happened in Israel, and at the music festival on October 7th was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain. What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate.

“My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilian loss and loss of children’s lives. And the systemic injustice we’re seeing unfolding the West Bank cannot be overlooked.”