Joe Hildebrand: Deborah Conway was cancelled for being a traitor to somebody else’s invented cause

Like Bob Dylan, Deborah Conway got a taste of mob logic when failing to instantly pledge allegiance to somebody else’s invented cause, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Two groundbreaking events in music history occurred over the past week: the new Bob Dylan biopic appeared in cinemas and Deborah Conway appeared on my podcast.

The film A Complete Unknown charts Dylan’s early years up until the electrifying moment when he, well, went electric.

The move so shocked the skivvy-wearing peacenik folk-left set that they booed and hissed at his concerts, famously calling him “Judas” for being a traitor to the cause of acoustic coffee house music.

This, combined with his growing reluctance to be associated with the anti-war movement – no doubt because he had met too many of its activists – meant he no longer did the right things or held the right views.

And so Dylan had to be cancelled.

Folk singer Bob Dylan goes electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Picture: David Gahr/Getty Images

That infamous attempt to boo Dylan from the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was perhaps the first recognisable outbreak of the cancel culture that swept through the world with the advent of social media and which some knuckle-draggers still persist with to this day.

It was different to the burning of Beatles records by evangelical Christians, or indeed the burning of Catholics by evangelical Christians – even though it might have shared the same puritanical zeal. John Lennon didn’t betray Southern Baptists when he quipped The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, he just offended them.

Teenagers gather at a “Beatles Burning” staged by radio WAYX-AM, where records, books, and wigs were burned in a bonfire in response to John Lennon's comment that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ.

But what Dylan did in the eyes of his persecutors was a far greater sin. The upper-middle class activist left thought he was one of them and so when he deviated from their ideological template, it wasn’t just an outrage, it was treason.

In an iconic line from The Simpsons, Lisa wakes from a nightmare in which she too gets booed onstage but then ponders, “Why would they come to our concert just to boo us?”

The point being that would be a ridiculous absurdity in the real world, and yet that is exactly what happened to Dylan at Newport: they came to his concert and then booed him for playing what he wanted to instead of what they wanted him to.

Deborah Conway got a taste of this mob logic when she dared to express the view that perhaps the proscribed terrorist organisation Hamas didn’t have the best interests of Palestinians at heart.

Singer Deborah Conway is angry about being 'cancelled' by music and festival organisers because of her pro-Israel views since the Israel-Hamas war began. Picture: Alex Coppel

Deborah Conway, one of the best singer-songwriters this country has ever produced, performing in 1997.

Conway is one of the best singer-songwriters this country has ever produced – her hit song Adultery is as good as anything The Beatles wrote – and she also happens to be Jewish, something I never knew when I was fangirling over her in the ’80s and ’90s. It is thus pretty unsurprising that she takes a pretty dim view of a terror group that wants to wipe Israel from the map, nor that she shares the widely held mainstream view that Hamas is largely responsible for the tragic carnage wrought on Gaza in response to their grotesquely murderous attack on October 7.

But, in the Orwellian world of cancel culture, the rightness or wrongness of her view is irrelevant. Such views are not there to be debated or disagreed with, they only exist to be eliminated.

Thus Conway promptly found herself cancelled. A scheduled appearance on the ABC to promote an upcoming show was vetoed – only to be mysteriously reinstated after inquiries by a journalist from another organisation. Meanwhile, the fury and condemnation flew on social media, with the ugly yet tiresomely predictable accusation that she was a supporter of “genocide”.

This was news to Conway, who appeared to the rest of the outside world as another peace-loving hippy musician. But no, just like Dylan, she was a traitor to the cause – a cause that was entirely somebody else’s invention and towards which her only crime was a failure to instantly pledge allegiance.

Such extreme demands for conformity were once rarely seen outside fascist or communist totalitarian states – or New England folk festivals. In 21st century liberal democracies, all it took was Twitter.

But the internet isn’t all bad. For one thing, you can easily find videos of the insufferable ponces who denounced Dylan for going electric. It is champagne comedy, albeit of the champagne socialist kind.

No doubt all these turtle-necked tosspots thought they too were on the right side of history. Instead, history shows them to be utterly ridiculous.

The same fate awaits those who condemn today’s unwitting apostates, and thanks to the same world wide web that enabled it, their screeching and sooking will be recorded for all posterity.

In the meantime, Conway and all the others who have been monstered by the mob can take some comfort and guidance from Dylan’s response to the miserablists who tried to silence him. “Play it f--king loud!”

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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Deborah Conway was cancelled for being a traitor to somebody else’s invented cause