The US rapper says he only discovered the impact of a deadly crowd surge after the festival in Texas.
Image source, Getty Images
US rapper Travis Scott has said he did not realise that concertgoers were in trouble during a deadly crowd surge as he performed in Texas last month.
“I stopped a couple of times… at the end of the day you just hear music,” he told the Breakfast Club radio show in his first interview since the incident.
Ten concertgoers were killed after panic broke out at the Astroworld music festival in Houston on 5 November.
Multiple lawsuits have since been filed over the tragedy.
Among those killed as a result of the crowd surge during Scott’s headline set was nine-year-old Ezra Blount.
The 30-year-old musician, one of the biggest names in rap music, has been criticised for not ending his show more abruptly.
In a YouTube interview published on Thursday, Scott told Breakfast Club presenter Charlamagne Tha God that he did not hear details about what had happened that night until a press conference after the show.
“At that moment you’re like: ‘Wait, what?’ People pass out, things happen at concerts, but something like that,” he said.
He described how he had paused his show “to make sure everyone was OK”, but that he did not notice any fans pleading for help or any apparent danger.
Asked how he felt about what had happened and how he was coping, Scott said he was still trying to come to terms with it all.
“Nothing like this has ever happened… at the end of the day these fans are your family, so you feel like you’ve lost something,” he said, adding that he now wanted to be “the voice” of the victims.
Scott launched Astroworld with concert promoters Live Nation in 2018.
At the time of the incident, there were about 50,000 people attending the festival at Houston’s NRG Park complex.
The ages of the victims range between 10 and 27.
Scott has offered to pay all funeral costs, but this has been rejected by half of the bereaved families, including the family of Blount.
Blount, who lived in Dallas, died nine days after the concert. He had previously been placed in medically induced coma due to the severity of his injuries.
In a statement, Scott has asked victims to reach out to him, saying he “desperately wishes to share his condolences and provide aid”.
He has also previously stated in an Instagram video that he was not aware how bad the situation had become during his set.
“Any time I could make out anything that’s going on, I just stopped the show and helped them get the help they need,” he said. “I could just never imagine the severity of the situation.”
But some Texas officials say the rapper should have stopped the show much earlier.
In an interview with NBC’s Today show last month, Houston fire chief Samuel Peña said: “At one point there was an ambulance that was trying to make its way through the crowd. The artist has command of that crowd.”