Soft Play brought out Kate Nash at Reading 2025, and used their performance to lead a chant of “Free Palestine”. Check out footage below.
The set took place today (August 22) at the opening day of Reading Festival, when the duo – Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent – took to the Chevron Stage and delivered a blistering rendition of tracks including ‘Act Violently’, ‘The Hunter’, ‘Girl Fight’ and more.
During the set, the group (formerly known as Slaves) had a Palestinian flag draped over the stack of amps behind them, and projected a message reading “Israel is committing genocide, our government is complicit, use your voice, free Palestine” onto the screen behind them.
“Fuck [Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin] Netanyahu. Free Palestine, it’s a fucking genocide,” frontman and drummer Holman said while on stage, before encouraging the crowd to “use your voice” and leading a chant of “free free Palestine”.
Also in the set, the duo called out Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, one assumes due to her anti-trans stance, and criticised the BBC, seemingly for their coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, exclaiming “fuck you BBC”.
The comments come following the Kent band declaring that they were “going to play” Spanish festival FIB Benicàssim – despite the festival’s links to investment firm KKR. The investment firm, which owns a stake in festival operations company Superstruct, have been criticised for their alleged ties with Israeli weapons manufacturing amid the country’s ongoing conflict with Palestine.
In their statement last month, the duo explained that were sticking in the line-up as the “festivals belonging to Superstruct are independently run” with “no control” over who buys their umbrella company.
🇵🇸Soft Play light up the Chevron stage at Reading Festival with the Palestine flag #softplay #readingfest #readingfestival #readingfestival2025 pic.twitter.com/mSxb2Dr4MF
— Wokingham.Today (@WokinghamToday) August 22, 2025
They added that they were concerned that “if we start boycotting every festival with ties to these kind of companies, we will de-platform ourselves and not have a stage to shout about the Palestinian people on.”
Also in the set at Reading 2025, Soft Play brought out Kate Nash as a special guest – introducing her to the stage to play the song ‘Slushy’.
That track was released as a collaboration earlier this year, and appeared on an expanded version of the punk duo’s fourth album ‘Heavy Jelly’. The original of which arrived last summer.
Speaking about the single, Soft Play and Kate Nash explained to NME how they thought their styles meshed for the release. “Both of us, as lyricists and artists, are people that use our environments and where we’re from to tell stories,” Nash said, while Vincent added: “It’s the social observations, like the ‘cheese on toast‘ lyric in [Kate’s 2007 track] ‘Merry Happy’. It’s the same with Isaac: he brings mundane objects into such sharp focus. It’s very British, I think.”
In other Soft Play news, the band have recently been announced as joining Biffy Clyro for the latter’s massive UK and Ireland tour, set to take place next year, and announced a reissue of their classic debut ‘Are You Satisfied?’, celebrating a decade since the original release.
Check back here for all of NME’s coverage of Reading & Leeds 2025.
