The 1975’s Matty Healy apologises to Ice Spice over offensive podcast comments

21 April, 2023

Matty Healy and Ice Spice

The 1975‘s Matty Healy has publicly apologised to Ice Spice over controversial comments he made on a podcast earlier this year.

Healy was widely criticised online back in February for his appearance on The Adam Friedland Show, during which he discussed how he believes Harry Styles “gets a pass” on criticism over alleged “queer-baiting”. Friedland and co-host Nick Mullen then discussed the New York rapper’s heritage, debating whether she has Hawaiian, Inuit or Chinese, before impersonating the accents of those countries and regions.

While Healy didn’t participate in the mocking of accents, he did laugh along with the podcast hosts. The episode has since been taken down.

Yungblud was among those who called out Healy online in the aftermath. In a now-viral tweet appearing to reference the podcast, Yungblud wrote: “Love listening to three privileged white dudes sit around and objectify a young black female artist who’s blowing up. Welcome to your 30’s, I guess.”

Almost two months on, however, Healy addressed the controversy on stage in Auckland as part of a show on the band’s ‘At Their Very Best’ tour. While talking to the crowd about how he hadn’t fully grasped the implications of his own fame, he took the opportunity to apologise to Ice Spice.

“I just feel a bit bad, and I’m kind of a bit sorry if I’ve offended you. Ice Spice, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not because I’m annoyed that me joking got misconstrued. It’s because I don’t want Ice Spice to think I’m a dick. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry.

He continued: “I don’t want anything like that misconstrued to be mean. I don’t mind being a bit of a joker… It’s OK for me to be, like, a trickster or whatever, but I don’t want to be seen as, like, being barmy. Because honestly, I just love you guys, and I love doing this…

“The truth is it’s a bit of a problem because I just want to say, “Hello. This is a bit embarrassing. I’m sorry if I get it wrong. We all get it wrong.” I just have to do it in public and then apologise to Ice Spice. My life’s just a bit weird. I am genuinely sorry if I’ve upset her because I fucking love her.”

Healy also recently announced that he was quitting social media, claiming that “the era of me being a fucking arsehole is coming to an end. I’ve had enough.”

The frontman continued: “I perform all the time and it’s my job and I love doing this but I can’t perform off the stage anymore as I just want to be a bloke.”

Elsewhere, The 1975 have shared a second episode of their new video series A theatrical performance of an intimate moment. It shows Healy in front of a mirror and gets progressively more and more frustrated with himself as he struggles to enunciate a lyric from the band’s 2022 single ‘I’m In Love With You’.

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