The Kunts fire back at LadBaby, accuses them of “using food banks to hawk records”
The Kunts have responded to comments made by LadBaby about their single ‘Boris Johnson Is STILL A Fucking C**t’, which they’re hoping will bag this year’s Christmas Number One.
Earlier this week, LadBaby’s Mark Hoyle criticised The Kunts for their attempt to score a Christmas Number One with their song about the British prime minister.
He told the Official Charts: “Definitely – it takes a certain sort of person to download a song with that in the title, but you never know.
“There’s definitely an element that people aren’t happy with this government, but our song is for charity – I don’t believe theirs is – and ours is trying to raise more money than ever for food banks. It’s something that is even more important given everything that is going on.”
He added: “Every year we say this will be the last time, but we keep coming back because the situation keeps getting worse. 7,000 food parcels are handed out every day this Christmas – that shouldn’t be happening in the UK.”
The YouTubers are going for their fourth consecutive Christmas Number One with ‘Sausage Rolls For Everyone’, which features Elton John and Ed Sheeran, who are similarly in the running with their own collab ‘Merry Christmas’. All proceeds from LadBaby’s single go to The Trussell Trust.
In response, The Kunts singer Kunt said at the time: “You’re all my sort of people. When you have someone in charge like Boris Johnson who lies, cheats and turns a blind eye to corruption, I think it is perfectly within our rights to express our dissatisfaction in any way we choose to do, while we still can. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, if anything we should be proud that we are prepared to stand up for what is right.”
Now, the band have responded further, issuing a statement to Clash in which they hit back at Hoyle and questioning his intentions with the charity single.
“Regarding Mark Hoyle’s comments that ‘it takes a certain sort of person to download a song with that in the title’, I agree with him wholeheartedly,” The Kunts’ said. “It takes the sort of person that is prepared to look beyond the tepid diarrhoea that is pumped into people’s consciousness via mainstream TV, radio and the tabloid newspapers. The sort of person that is prepared [to] stand up for what they believe in and call out the government on their lies, cover-ups and corruption.
Kunt then revealed that his band had made “large donations” from sales of their 2020 single ‘Boris Johnson Is A F*****g C***’ to charities including Mind For Mental Health and Cardiac Risk In The Young, after being affected by both causes.
“We may be vulgar in the language we use to get our point across but we would not be so vulgar as to use food banks to hawk records, increase our profile or sign lucrative sponsorship deals,” Kunt continued. “Let me be clear, we would not stoop to using poverty, hunger and despair to promote our career and bolster our bank balance like we believe LadBaby have done in this year’s and last year’s Christmas Number One campaign.”
The singer went on to question LadBaby’s transparency and “how much of people’s 99p was going to the charity”.
He concluded: “But please don’t let any of this distract from the fact that the Trussell Trust is a necessary and worthy charity at this point in time and it is good to support food banks with donations of food and money, we do, but at the root of the problem is the corrupt and heartless Conservative government, and the man in charge of that who leads by example is Boris Johnson.
Speaking to NME recently about the race for Christmas Number One, Kunt said: “There’s definitely a bigger buzz already than at this point last year, but we are a few troublemakers chivvying people along on social media, compared to the massive major label publicity machine behind Sheeran, Elton and LadBaby – so whether we get there will be purely down to whether enough people find out about it in time, and also whether people really believe that together we can all make a difference.”
Asked what it would mean to him to get the Christmas Number One, Kunt said: “It would mean everything. Not just personally but the idea of it being written into the history books that at Christmas 2021 collectively we all stood up and said, ‘We deserve better than this’.”
