Wildfire Productions, which organised the recent Ignition Concert has disassociated itself from any calls for violence made by the artistes or the DJ during the event.
In a press release issued on Thursday, the company said it was committed to bringing great entertainment to Guyana as entertainment was its business and not the promotion of violence.
“We can assure the general public that we do not believe in promoting violence of any kind and we strongly [condemn] it. We apologize if anyone was offended by any statements made by the artists or DJ’s hired to entertain at our Ignition Concert,” the statement said.
Stabroek News, in its Monday edition this week, reported on gunfire at the show, the vicious campaign against gays and the promotion of gun violence by the controversial Bounty Killer and a call by the DJ for “bad men from Buxton and Agricola to represent as the Five Star General (Bounty Killer) was about to ignite the concert”. The article had caused some tempers in the Wildfire Camp to flare and it was labelled as “inaccurate”.However, in its statement, Wildfire said it took blame for the disorder that occurred during Bounty Killer’s performance. But said that was owing to the sound and light company’s technical difficulties.
Wildfire said that after three outages, Bounty Killer was instructed to leave and frustration led to bottles being hurled at the stage in protest of his premature departure.
“The newspaper made it appear that bottles were thrown at Bounty Killer because of his lyrics and performance but this was not the case. As we can report the bottles were hurled as a result of the power outage from the sound system so many times…,” it added.
According to the report, the police were forced to take matter into their own hands by discharging some warning shots to disperse the crowd who were throwing bottles, since the mic could not be used owing to lack of power.
The company said the police’s action worked effectively as there was a sense of normalcy and there were no reports of injuries from the hospital the next day.
The report acknowledged that the company needs to be more stringent with its suppliers given the failures in sound and lighting and the bar service which sold patrons beverages in bottles instead of plastic cups as had been arranged.
The company while thanking fans for their support apologized for the events that occurred owing to the shortcoming of suppliers.
