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Wiley won’t pay back CockRock fee
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 1 August 2013
Wiley has said he has no intention of returning his fee to promoters of the CockRock Festival in Cumbria, after organisers of the charity event said they were planning legal action after the rapper stormed off stage after just fifteen minutes of his 45 minute set.
As previously reported, Wiley received a hostile reception at the Cockermouth event last month, partly because he had been busy slagging off the festival on Twitter ahead of his arrival. The rapper says he left the stage early because the audience were throwing things at the stage, adding that staff at the festival had advised him to walk if that happened.
But organisers have countered that the atmosphere during the short Wiley set was not as hostile or dangerous as the rapper has claimed, and that security had it under control. With that in mind, the BBC says promoters now plan to sue to get some of Wiley’s reported £15K fee back.
But the rapper told the Beeb: “They say it’s a charity event and they want their money back. I’ve just stood on stage and been coined and bottled. Obviously I’m not giving the money back”.
Adding that the critical tweets ahead of the show were aimed at his agent, not the CockRock audience, he continued: “When I went on I knew some people were going to be unhappy. The escalation on Twitter is uncontrollable. The woman who was looking after us said if it gets too much, come off. After fifteen minutes I looked at the floor and it was covered in coins. Any one of those coins could have taken my eye out”.
Despite seemingly ready to fight over the fees, Wiley did seem keen to play down any beef between him and the people of Cumbria. Asked why he referred to locals as ‘pagans’, he quickly cleared that one up. “Pagan’s just a word but they don’t know that yet. It’s a London thing. I don’t want them to think I hate Cumbria”. In case you wondered, ‘pagan’ is just slang for ‘idiot’. So that’s alright then.
