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James Bay has spoken out to distance himself from quotes in which he appeared to be attacking Lily Allen over her negative stance towards the BRIT Awards.
Allen previously slammed the BRITs for the lack of diversity in their nominations and for not giving grime enough credit, before Bay said that he 'couldn't remember' her last release.
Now, Bay has denied ever attacking Allen - telling WENN: “Having been out of the country in Australia and America for the past 3 weeks I was unaware of Lily’s comments about the Brits. I fully support and believe the Brits should represent a diverse spectrum of artists and music.
“I don’t feel negative towards Lily or her music at all. I’d simply been unaware of her most recent release and subsequently someone has been over creative with this whole story.”
When the BRIT Award nominations were announced last month, Stormzy expressed his disappointment that the awards were lacking in grime nominations after it had been such a strong year for the genre, and Lily Allen swiftly agreed - saying that the industry was "blind to black talent."
"The voting academy consists of 1000 music industry figures, and here lies the problem," she wrote in a now-deleted Facebook post, "music industry figures don’t necessarily care about music, they mostly care about themselves, they vote tactically for their labels artists to win or so that their competitors at other labels DON'T."
She continued: "Awards mean £££ and promotions. i don’t think music industry figures (or people that work at major labels) even look at artists as artists when it comes to voting for these things, the artists represent their teams their a+r people, managers, mds, pluggers etc…Skepta JME and Stormzy are all unsigned artists, who would gain from them winning anything? In fact them being nominated or even winning poses a direct threat to ‘music industry figures’."
