Led By Donkeys: “It’s weird when right-wing commentators get outraged by left politics at Glastonbury – what did they expect?”

Once nightfall hits Glastonbury Festival, making the long pilgrimage to the South East Corner is a non-negotiable for the party inclined each evening. It’s often known as the ​“naughty corner”, with its wild production, slick programming and dance music that doesn’t pause until the sun rises again.

But the nickname belies an underlying truth – that there’s far more to the area than pure fun and disconnected hedonism. One of its crown jewels is the immersive audiovisual IICON field in Block9, marked by a massive, pseudo-religious concrete head that nods to a dystopian technological future. And set opposite the stage this year is an installation featuring a tall rocket, with a queue of people who aim to take us there – politicians, tech billionaires and right-wing influencers – wearing orange spacesuits.

“Send them to Mars, while we party on Earth”, it reads. Lining up to enter the spaceship are the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, JK Rowling, Boris Johnson, Jordan Peterson and JD Vance. Created by art and activism collective Led By Donkeys, the installation plays on Musk’s long-stated goal to colonise Mars via his SpaceX company, with the Tesla and X (formerly Twitter) CEO claiming that Mars missions would begin as early as next year.

And next to the spaceship is a crumpled Tesla, with a numberplate simply reading ​“FASCISM”, topped with a Block9 shipping container lying across it. In May, Led By Donkeys filmed a 98-year-old war veteran named Ken drive over the car in a WWII tank. ​“We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again,” Ken said. 

The collaboration fits within Block9’s wider engagement with the world around it, which it has done since its debut iteration at the festival in 2007. Founded by Gideon Berger and Stephen Gallagher, the area celebrates dance music’s radical and queer roots via its LGBTQ+ nightclub mecca The NYC Downlow and The Meat Rack, and the intersection between activist politics and free rave history at acid house citadel Genosys. Palestine flags are found across the site, while even the toilets feature fun flyers – ​“Poop on JK Rowling” reads one cubicle. 

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Beyond the messaging, Block9 raises money for good causes via the Downlow’s moustache scheme, with Crisis, Human Dignity Trust and Freedom from Torture among the beneficiaries. And throughout the weekend, festival-goers who buy a drink are asked if they want to donate an extra £1 to Medical Aid for Palestinians (M.A.P.), while the team from PrEPster hand out safe sex ​“fuck packs” with lube, condoms and consent information inside.

Speaking to Huck this year, Block9 co-head Stephen Gallagher explained: ​“Dance music and politics have always been at the heart of what we do. We create this alternative reality where it’s possible to focus on being human beings. It’s not about forgetting what’s going on in the real world – it’s about imagining something that’s better.” 

To hear more about creating the installation, we caught up with Led By Donkeys, speaking about the intersection of music, art and activism at the ​“most political” Glastonbury in recent times.

How was your Glastonbury 2025? And what were your highlights?

Glastonbury was great, always is. We all loved seeing friends, getting our installation up and seeing so much incredible music. Way too many highlights to list, but that Saturday afternoon on West Holts stage with Kneecap felt like the centre of something really special. Where art is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Across the weekend, the intersection between music, art and protest was everywhere – musicians calling out politicians, crowds waving Palestine flags, and installations like Led By Donkeys and Terminal 1 directly confronting issues in the real world. What did you make of it? Was it the most political Glastonbury ever?

Don’t think this was necessarily the most political Glastonbury ever, maybe the most in recent years. It was very political around the time of the Iraq War and back in the ​’80s. But at its core, it’s always been more than just music. It’s always weird when right-wing commentators get outraged by left politics at Glastonbury. What did they expect?

How important is it to have these spaces, and for artists and musicians to continue to foster them in a time when it is becoming more difficult and dangerous to protest traditionally on the streets?

It is getting harder to protest, harder to command attention for the important issues, so Glastonbury and the commitment of artists is so important. Emily Eavis and Nick Dewey deserve credit for holding the line under immense pressure to keep Kneecap playing the festival.

For me, seeing the backlash from politicians and sections of traditional media felt really jarring compared to being at the place, where all weekend the energy felt strongly centred around unity and peace. What do you make of the coverage? And how out of touch with the general mood, and especially the mood of young people, do you think they are?

It’s weird to read about Glastonbury in the press when you’ve been there. It’s such a welcoming, tolerant place. It feels special, peaceful, beautiful. Then you read some slightly unhinged commentators saying it was like a ​“Nuremberg Rally”. Younger people (we’re not that young any more) are so aware of what’s happening, for example in Palestine, and they compare it to the establishment line and know there is a massive disconnect.

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That disconnect is what your installation is about. ​“Send them to Mars, while we party on Earth”. Can you talk about the concept, and what you wanted to get across?

We knew we had an epic space to play with opposite the IICON stage, but to be honest, it’s always a challenge to fuse politics and partying in a way that makes sense. Sometimes our take is to keep those spaces apart, sometimes partying can be a restorative part of doing our politics – to replenish ourselves – but we felt with this one we’d landed on a concept that could do both. How did it come about? Well, a good friend of ours gave us a delicious, earthy chocolate bar, and we gobbled it up and went for a walk in a field. Some of our best ideas come about that way.

Tech bros like Musk and Bezos say they want humanity to become interplanetary, so we wanted to send them to Mars while we partied on Earth. We designed and built a massive space rocket at the festival, and the idea was to use it to launch Elon, Jeff and Mark Zuckerberg into space (well, not really, it was made of plywood, but we can but dream). We think the tech bros are wrong. Dangerously wrong. Living on Mars is a stupid idea – we need to put our energies into protecting our own planet. After all, it’s the one place humanity can really thrive.

Can you talk about how the collaboration with Block9 came about, and why you wanted to work with them specifically?

Gideon Berger and Steve Gallagher have created an incredible space at Glastonbury, and we’ve admired their work for years. Nobody can walk into that area and look at something like the IICON stage and not think these people have creativity and ambition breaking out of them. The things they build are stunning and otherworldly. And their politics is in all their work, but in the subtle ways that are always hardest but more effective to realise – we love them for it. We’ve been in contact for years about various side projects, and this year this space opened up, so we had a little think about the tech bros who wield enormous power over our lives with zero accountability.

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It was also the first time that a lot of people were able to see the Tesla that WWII veteran Ken crushed with a tank up in person. Can you talk about that piece, how you managed to make that happen, and the symbolism behind it?

The Tesla CEO Elon Musk was actively supporting the far right. We’d been doing stuff on Musk for months when someone offered us their Tesla and said: ​‘Please destroy it for me.’ That was when we found a 98-year-old WWII veteran and an old D‑Day tank. How else are you going to crush a Tesla? We put FASCISM number plates on it and let Ken, the old soldier, drive over it in the tank. Just before doing it, he said, ​“We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again.”

At Block9, the intersection between dance music, free rave history, queer joy and activist politics are celebrated, all while supporting good causes. How important is it to remember the long history of these different movements and how they have historically intersected?

It’s vital to remember, to mark and to renew the links between all these causes. And you just feel it when you’re in Block9. You feel the legacy of the ​’90s free party culture, the history of protest in this country and how important queer culture has been to protest in this country. It was an honour to have our installation there.

With no Glastonbury next year, where should people party and keep fighting the good fight?

Everywhere, but especially in their own communities. One way to fight fascism is to build communities.

Follow Led By Donkeys on Instagram, X and YouTube.

Follow Block9 on Instagram.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s dig­i­tal edi­tor. Fol­low him on Bluesky.

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