The 1975 singer Matty Healy has issued an apology for controversial comments he made about rapper Ice Spice on The Adam Friedland Show in February.
“I just feel a bit bad, and I’m kind of a bit sorry if I’ve offended you,” Healy said during a recent 1975 show in Auckland, New Zealand as a kind of blanket apology for his series of odd or offensive actions in the spotlight, according to a fan video of the mea culpa. “Ice Spice, I’m sorry. 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 d–k. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry. I don’t want it to be misconstrued as mean. I don’t mind being a bit of a joker… but I am genuinely sorry if I’ve upset them because I f–king love them,” he added while cradling a half-drunk bottle of wine.
In the Friedland bit earlier this year, the show’s hosts played a clip of the “Munch” rapper talking about her love of alternative music, including Coldplay and The 1975 from an Elle interview in January.
The hosts and Healy then begin speculating on Spice’s ethnicity, with jokes about her sounding like an “Inuit Spice Girl,” a “chubby Chinese lady” and one of them saying, “‘Yeah, I rap and make music’ Do they talk like that? Do Inuits talk like that?” The audio of the podcast then found Healy and the hosts imitating Chinese and Hawaiian accents as they laughed out loud and joked about what Healy should have said when he slipped into Ice Spice’s DMs.
After one of the men suggested Healy should have asked about her ethnic background while dropping an Inuit ethnic slur, Healy called Ice Spice “dumb.” The offensive episode was pulled from Apple and Spotify earlier this month but can still be heard on Youtube.
The rambling chat also included Healy and the hosts chuckling about “gay song parodies” of hits by Daniel Bedingfield and Dobie Gray in which NSFW lyrics were swapped in for the original. Healy also opined that “I don’t think the gays really like it” in reference to what the hosts termed the “pass” Harry Styles’ has gotten from the queer community. “It’s young girls that think it’s a new thing that are like, ‘Oh my God,’” Healy said of Styles’ inclusive, gender-fluid sensibility. “Maybe it’s not all gay guys but it’s a lot of them,” he added.
At the time, Yungblud took the trio to task for their offensive comments, tweeting, “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…” Healy responded at the time with an Instagram Story video mocking Yungblud’s activism and support for “underrated youth.”
Earlier this month Healy said he was quitting social media again saying “the era of me being a f–king arsehole is coming to an end. I’ve had enough.”
