Kanye West stage invasion by Lee Nelson divides Glastonbury fans
Some laughed, some cringed, but no-one could ignore the upstaging of the Glastonbury headliner
Comedian Lee Nelson caused a bit of a storm last night when he invaded the Glastonbury stage to disrupt Kanye West's performance.
“Was that Lee Nelson?” wondered thousands of music fans as they sat open-mouthed at the brief intrusion by a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word LEE-ZUS.
Not long later Nelson confirmed that it was indeed him:
Nelson, real name Simon Brodkin, came on to the Pyramid stage during the rapper's fourth song Black Skinhead and larked around before being swiftly wrestled away by a security guard. (Nelson/Brodkin has form with this sort of thing: last year he managed to sneak into a photograph with the England football team before last year’s World Cup in Brazil).
Some liked it:
Take a bow Lee Nelson.......
— Geoff Beer (@geoffbeero) June 28, 2015
Some were a little irritated:
And comedian Janey Godley suggested she wouldn't mind giving her fellow comic a taste of his own medicine one day:
Comedy actress Rebecca Front reminded people that Kanye had form when it comes to stage invasions:
New Top Gear host Chris Evans was a little non-plussed:
Comedian Mark Steel appeared to be speaking for a lot of Glastonbury watchers when he suggested this:
I wonder if anyone else in the world has noticed there's a side to Kanye West that could, in certain circumstances, be a bit irritating.
— Mark Steel (@mrmarksteel) June 27, 2015
Clearly someone thought so.
And if you want to know exactly how Twitter opinion fell among the 76,000 or so tweets about Kanye West's performance last night using a new method of social media analysis, we can tell you.
Research compiled by Oxford University's Dr Karo Moilanen, CTO and co-founder of TheySay Ltd - a new state-of-the art linguistics tool which does this sort of thing and even measures human emotions like sarcasm - revealed that 44% were "supportive" of West's Glasto spectacular and 56% were "haters" of his performance.
However, negative sentiment appeared to be much stronger on Twitter than amongst the actual audience, according to the research.
