Wiley will not return his fee from last month's CockRock festival, insisting that violent fans forced him to cut short his headline set. The grime MC is expected to be sued by organisers of the Cumbrian event, the crowds at which he referred to as "pagans".
"Obviously I'm not giving the money back," Wiley told BBC Newsbeat. While he had been expected to perform for around 45 minutes, "after 15 minutes I looked at the floor and it was covered in coins," he recalled. "I've just stood on stage and been coined and bottled ... Any one of those coins could have taken my eye out."
According to reports, CockRock's crowd was angry because of tweets Wiley made before even arriving in Cockermouth. "Please stop sending me to farms to perform," he wrote. "My agent knows that there are cool places to play and other places are just not worth the hassle."
When he arrived at CockRock, Wiley found the audience was clearly upset. "The woman who was looking after us said if it gets too much, come off," he recalled later. But the situation escalated even further when the 34-year-old left the stage and started goading the crowd via Twitter. He repeatedly referred to them as "pagans".
"Pagan," he now claims, is simply slang for "idiot". "It's a London thing," he said. "Pagan's just a word but they don't know that yet ... I don't want them to think I hate Cumbria."
That still doesn't seem to have reassured Marie Whitehead, one of CockRock's organisers. She confirmed to the BBC that they will be pursuing the rapper for breach of contract, and they may be asking for much more than Wiley's £15,000 fee: festival solicitors are examining "all angles of the damage" from his performance.
Wiley's ninth studio album, The Ascent, was released in April.
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