And Finally Artist News Media

All Will.i.am wants is a London passport and a flat in The Shard. Is that so much to ask?

By | Published on Monday 23 March 2015

Will.i.am

Poor Will.i.am. He may have concurrently successful careers in music, tech and broadcasting, but one of the basic levels on Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs is still not being satisfied for him yet. He doesn’t have a place he can truly call home. Worst of all, he knows exactly the place where he’d be truly happy, but none of his many jobs pay enough for him to live there.

It all seemed so easy back in August 2014. Then he told the Evening Standard: “I want to have an apartment in The Shard. One day I’m gonna live in there, I know it”.

But seven months later, an air of despair had entered his previously sparky tone. “I want to live in the Shard”, he wept on the shoulder of the Standard earlier this month. “Dude, I want to be a citizen and have a London passport. London is the centre of the world”.

Look at us Londoners, all walking around with our passports, free to go over the border into whatever is outside London and back again whenever we want. Not Will though. Will is trapped on a temporary work visa, at risk of being booted out into Wiltshire or somewhere similar at any moment. And all he wants to do is buy a flat in The Shard and live there as a London Citizen, but he can’t. And who is to blame for this? The bloody BBC, that’s who.

“The Shard is expensive and they don’t pay that much at the BBC so I’ll stay in someone’s yard instead of the Shard”.

Are you happy, The BBC? Are you happy that you’re making Will.i.am sleep rough in people’s gardens? Honestly, first sacking Jeremy Clarkson for just punching a guy a little, and now this. Is this what we pay our licence fee for? So that multi-millionaire entrepreneurs can’t afford to buy a flat in one of our capital’s most expensive buildings? You make me sick, The BBC. Sick to my very stomach.

Will.i.am is a more magnanimous man than I though. And he’s got a can-do attitude that’s really going to take him places one of these days. Because last week, having cried out all his tears, and realised that London isn’t actually a country, he was back on the campaign trail.

“I want to become a proper Brit”, he beamed at The Sun. “I have been coming here for years and I just like it. It feels like home. I want to live in the Shard but it is expensive and [‘The Voice’] doesn’t really pay the bill but I’ll figure it out”.

You hear that? He’s going to figure it out! It’s enough to make you well up. You go, Will!



READ MORE ABOUT: | |