Who is the real Eve Barlow?

Eve Barlow remembers exactly where she was when she realised things had changed. “I was standing to the side of the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury,” the writer tells Life. She was there to see Katy Perry, but Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn came out first. “I could see, from Corbyn’s perspective, the galvanised worship culture around him,” she recalls. 

Back in the press area after Perry’s performance, “all everyone was talking about with stars in their eyes was Jeremy Corbyn”.  There and then, Eve “had a crisis of conscience”.

Many of us have had such moments of horror over the past decade, and especially since October 7. They usually took place in less notable spots, though – and few of us have taken up the fight in the way Eve has, and continues to. Whether that is through social media, giving talks, or on her Substack newsletter, Blacklisted, Eve is not afraid to loudly and proudly battle antisemitism and advocate for Israel.

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Indeed, while most return from Glastonbury needing to sleep and nurse a hangover, Eve reacted by doing what she knows best – writing. She wound up penning an open letter warning people about the risks of voting for Corbyn’s Labour party. Nobody would publish it. Undeterred, she put it out online herself. “I was like, ‘I have to say something’, and I vomited it out,” she explains.

Prior to this, Eve had gone from being the deputy editor at NME, an institution she revered as a reader and for which she adored writing,
to being a hugely successful freelancer in LA. She spoke to some of the planet’s biggest stars for some of the planet’s biggest publications.
She had always thought she should stay in the world of music, film and pop culture journalism, but she found it impossible to look the other
way when she noticed certain things.

At one point, a famous LA synagogue was vandalised during a Black Lives Matter protest. She tweeted her fury. “I basically said, ‘I support your rage. I support your right to protest. But you cannot fight one form of hate with another form of hate.’ And vandalising a synagogue is not the same as vandalising an Urban Outfitters or a Nike store.

Vandalising a synagogue is not taking on capitalism “unless… uhuh, you think you are because you think that the Jews control the world,” she points out. “That tweet got me completely and utterly cancelled.”

The freelance work dried up. “I immediately received [a message] from an editor at a huge content publication in America to say that I had made an egregious error on my Twitter and that this was a major problem. I never worked for them again,” she reveals.

Certain social media followers disappeared and relationships ended. “I noticed people were distancing themselves from me, pretending like we were never connected.” It was painful, given the sense of admiration and love she had had previously had from the music community.

This hurtful incident propelled Eve into the next part of her life and career. She was no longer Eve Barlow, music, film and pop culture writer. “My fight or flight went into overdrive. It’s been six years since I was cancelled, and I have not relented at all.”  That’s putting it mildly. Day in, day out, Eve has her say.

She does not see her work as political. “Having safety and security as a member of your society and having that threatened as a result of your ethno-religion or your sexuality or your race, that is not political,” she insists. She also argues that “identity politics has broken the discourse, and it has been utilised by bad faith actors”.

It is hard not to feel that her work is, in fact, political. Her sense that it isn’t actually underlines the collection of contradictions that make Eve such as fascinating figure to follow, read and talk to. She is the music journalist who had to leave the pop world behind. The apolitical activist taking on the hottest of topics.

Eve is also a proud lesbian who has pushed back against the pro-Palestinian tide in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Here, she is not the contradiction but the person pointing out that the Queers for Palestine crowds would not last very long in Gaza but would find themselves safe and celebrated in Israel.

Eve’s analysis is that, for decades, the LGBT community has positioned itself as “the people who don’t fit in”, adding: “So, the branding of Palestinianism as being part of this makes a lot of sense.” If the Palestinians are oppressed, the members of another oppressed group must stand with them and take on the supposed oppressor.

Never mind the Palestinians’ total rejection of gay rights, nor that, for all its flaws, Israel is the “friendliest, most accepting society for [the LGBT] community in the Middle East”,

Writing in the Jewish journal Sapir, Eve argued that “it should mean something to the LGBTQ community that they’re defending their own would-be murderers; at the very least, they
should know their proper place in Hamas’s worldview. (Hint: no place.) That this means nothing to them says a lot”. Doesn’t it just.

Eve Barlow is one of those people with whom you can talk for ages. She is engaged and engaging, even when holding a transatlantic conversation over video, instead of in the pub. Her eyes gain an intensity whenever you hit on a passion point.

It is, though, hard to pick out the real person under the rhetorical armour developed after years of charging towards enemy lines. Eve is proud of her fight and her own resilience, while also clearly missing the life she once had. Perhaps, in the end, she has ended up exactly where she was always meant to be.