Biffy Clyro's Simon Neil Calls Boris Johnson A "Heinous Lump Of Beef"

Given that they recently launched a wonderful 'Mon The NHS' T-shirt with all proceeds going to NHS staff and volunteers, it's no surprise that Biffy Clyro are huge fans of the UK's healthcare system. And frontman Simon Neil has defended it further by criticising how Boris Johnson and the Conservatives have been neglecting it.

Referring to both the coronavirus pandemic and the years of carelessness before it, Simon tells NME that the prime minister – a “heinous lump of beef” – mistreated the NHS long before Boris came down with the illness himself.

“The NHS should be untouchable now for generations and generations,” says the frontman. “Make no mistake: Boris was a few months away from selling it off. After he was ill [with coronavirus], he was like, ‘I owe them my life – I can never repay them.’ Yes you can, you bastard: you owe them millions. Hopefully he’s a man of his word and does something. We need the NHS more than we need the fucking government.”

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Discussing the situation we're all in right now, Simon told Kerrang! how he's been applauding the NHS every Thursday night, and it's given him hope about people coming together for a greater good.

“I feel the one good thing to have come from all this is that, even though we’re isolated, I do feel like we feel more together than we have been in a long while,” he said. “That’s a strange situation to be in. Every Thursday when I stick my head outside the door to applaud the NHS and see my whole street doing the same, it gives you the little bit of fortitude and belief in society that most people are decent.”

He also spoke of how the meaning of the title of Biffy's new album, A Celebration Of Endings, has changed lately:

“Because of what we’re going through now, there’s no way that we can come out the other side of this without some kind of enlightenment,” he explained. “I feel like even the darkest, dumbest souls will come out of this with some kind of realisation about what you value, and I hope that Celebration Of Endings will be about no longer valuing things that bring nothing of virtue to the world.

“The title A Celebration Of Endings has become more prescient that I ever could have imagined. There’s no doubt that this is the end of something and the beginning of something else, and I hope that we get rid of people like Boris Johnson, Trump, all these fucking liars that are still gaslighting the people of their countries, still lying even when it’s coming down to people’s lives. Look, I want our economy and our country to do well, but when it comes down to you weighing up whether to open shops being more important than people dying, I think we’ve got a real problem.”

Biffy Clyro's new album A Celebration Of Endings is released August 14.

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