English musician Dolly Mavies is speaking out after she and her band garnered worldwide attention for walking out of a concert last month, after hearing Vice President JD Vance might be there.
Mavies told the BBC that this exposure, following her posting her experience in a now-viral Aug. 11 video on TikTok, led to her getting “wonderful comments and support from people all across the world.”
“Obviously there’s an overwhelming sense of support in America,” she said. “I think for a lot of American people there’s a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of people are scared, and it was amazing to feel like they’d been heard.”
Some accused the folk-rock singer-songwriter of posting the video as a PR stunt, which she denies.
“We definitely didn’t do that at all,” she said. “If we were that clever we would have done something before now.”
Mavies was initially “suspicious” after turning up at the ritzy venue in a farm shop, and seeing a “lot of security around, which there isn’t normally, and then a huge convoy of police motorbikes and very big cars,” she said.
“We then clocked that it must be somebody who we weren’t going to be very happy to see,” she said in the viral TikTok Video. “Yeah, that’s right, JD Vance.”
Back in August, Vance and his family went on vacation to the Cotswolds. Someone familiar with Vance denied to the BBC that the vice president ever attended the pricey store, which sells hampers for over $900, despite local news reporting that he was there.
Back in August, Vance and his family went on vacation to the Cotswolds. Peter Summers/Getty Images
But Mavies wasn’t the only one upset by the second family’s presence in the Cotswolds. Residents of the area complained their visit left them “completely sealed off from the outside world,” according to a Telegraph article.
Even famed Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson roasted the vice president’s stay. In an Instagram post, Clarkson shared an image showing Vance’s apparent no-fly zone, which included Clarkson’s Cuddle Hill Farm, causing a halt to the filming of his TV show Clarkson’s Farm.
“The JD Vance no-fly zone. We are the pin. So on the downside, no drone shots today. On the upside, no annoying light aircraft,” he wrote in the post.