Sheeran Supports Quit After Macklemore Cut
Every remaining support act on Ed Sheeran’s U.S. tour has walked off the bill after Macklemore was removed for on-stage remarks on Palestine, leaving the headliner without openers days after he said the promoter, not he, had made the call.
On Tuesday the rest of the bill followed him out. Finneas said an artist who speaks for people under occupation should not be told to stay quiet. Beoga, on stage with Sheeran every night, said they would not play rooms that treat “Free Palestine” as a firing offence. Aaron Rowe called the choice hard. Sheeran, he said, had changed his life – but he left anyway. Lukas Graham put it more plainly: a concert is still a place where you should be able to talk about war, and about children being killed, wherever they live.
Sheeran wrote on Instagram that “Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine.” He said he would not strand fans, crew or other acts. He had spent the week talking to venues “to try and build a bridge,” he said, but Messina Touring Group ended the booking. Messina told Rolling Stone venues had refused to let Macklemore play, which would have cancelled dates and hit “hundreds of thousands of fans.”
It started on 4 September at MetLife Stadium. Macklemore told the New Jersey crowd he had joined the tour in part so he could say two words in a room that size: Free Palestine. He then played Hind’s Hall over film from Gaza. Parts of the stadium cheered. Within hours the Israeli American Council was circulating a petition to throw him off the dates. StopAntisemitism called the set an ambush; Pink pushed that post to her followers. He came back the next night and spoke directly to Jews in the audience: attacking Israel, and calling the war genocide and apartheid, was not an attack on them. Israel denies genocide and says it is fighting in self-defence after Hamas killed about 1,200 people and seized 251 hostages on 7 October 2023. Gaza’s health ministry, whose numbers the United Nations treats as reliable, says more than 73,780 Palestinians have been killed since.
Macklemore said on Monday that he had been dropped. He named Robert Kraft, owner of Gillette Stadium and a man who once hired Sheeran to play his wedding, as organiser of a boycott. Kraft confirmed he barred the rapper, saying the venue would not “provide a platform for hate speech” and citing what he called “a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric.” He said only “selective information” that ignored Hamas advanced hate. He did not address whether he had pressed other buildings. Several departing acts said Kraft’s role mattered. “Money doesn’t give you the right to own the conversation,” Lukas Graham wrote.
Sheeran said he was “appalled by the conflict” and that suffering “on both sides is a human tragedy,” but that his shows were not a “political forum” because children sit in the crowd. “I am not complicit,” he wrote. “There is room for multiple approaches to the same end: Peace.” Macklemore said he understood Sheeran’s bind and rejected neutrality. “There is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed.” If the row put Palestine back in the conversation, he said, it was “the most successful tour I’ve ever been on.”
