Rage Against the Machine have demanded Nigel Farage changes the name of his podcast called Farage Against the Machine.
In a cease and desist letter sent to the former Ukip leader on Tuesday, the US band said his podcast, hosted on LBC radio, “brazenly and unlawfully exploits” their name.
They said that any implication of RATM’s “endorsement” of Farage or his policies was “particularly abhorrent” owing to what the band called his “far-right political views”.
They insisted Farage, who is an MEP, should no longer use their name and that he should find “some other target to troll”. They suggested he could focus on the US president, Donald Trump, whom Farage had said he considered a good friend.
The letter by the band’s main attorney, Howard King, also demanded Farage stopped using all marketing, promotion and advertising with everything that “falsely associates you, your colleagues at LBC and Fox, and your far-right political views with RATM”.
A post on the band’s Twitter account when Farage revealed his podcast’s name in March said: “This pissweasel IS the machine – peddling the sort of inane, blame-heavy bullshit that the guys in @RATM have been raging against since day one”.
Farage has yet to comment, and he neglected to mention the issue when he briefly appeared on Jeremy Vine’s weekday BBC Radio 2 show on Wednesday.
On the show the Ukip MEP talked instead about whether the World Cup could unite the country. When Ed Miliband, standing in for Vine, asked: “Aren’t you a symbol of the division we have?” Farage instead commented on public “anger against the political establishment”, adding: “The government is betraying Brexit.”
On the iTunes Podcast service, Farage’s show has garnered a 3.5-out-5 listener rating. More than 300 written responses range from claim that he is “one of the few people in the world of politics prepared to tell it like it is”, to a rejection of the podcast as “utter rubbish”.
This is not the first instance of a clash between musicians and politicians. In 1984, Bruce Springsteen had Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign remove the song Born in the USA as a campaign accompaniment.
Similarly, Trump played Queen’s famous anthem We Are the Champions at the Republican national convention in 2016 despite a public announcement by the guitarist Brian May that the band would “never give permission” for that. In a succinct response to Trump’s actions the band tweeted that this was “an unauthorised use at the Republican convention against our wishes”.