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Hospital Records cuts ties with Mistabishi over racist comments
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 16 January 2018
Hospital Records has announced that it has stopped selling a number of early Mistabishi records it released, following racist comments made by the producer. The label has also said that it will donate any further income it receives from these releases to the Love Music Hate Racism charity.
Mistabishi, real name James Pullen, stirred controversy over the weekend, after posting a response to a news report that London Mayor Sadiq Khan had said that Donald Trump had cancelled a trip to the UK because he’d “got the message” that Londoners do not want him in the city.
“I’m a Londoner and would be THRILLED to have the US President visit this city”, wrote the producer on his social network accounts. “Sadiq Khan isn’t a real Londoner”.
In a subsequent comment thread under the now deleted Facebook post (although the initial remark remains on Twitter), Pullen was quizzed on what he meant. He responded that Khan’s family hadn’t lived in England for long enough to be considered English, or for the Mayor himself to be a proper Londoner.
Pullen then made the bold claim that his family “can be traced back [in England] over a thousand years”, while adding that Khan was just the child of “some cunt [who] wandered off a boat”. This, he reckoned, makes him more of a Londoner than the mayor, and apparently therefore more entitled to an opinion about what the majority of Londoners believe. Which is the sort of logic you might expect from someone whose family haven’t bothered checking out anywhere else in the world in over a millennia.
Hospital Records released the debut Mistabishi album ‘Drop’, and a number of Pullen’s early singles and EPs under the name. They subsequently parted company, but the label continued to sell those releases. In a statement last night, it said that it was now cutting all ties with the producer, following his latest comments.
“At Hospital Records, Hospitalitydnb and Med School we do not tolerate racism of any kind”, reads the statement. “Our ethos of equality and total inclusivity to all remains, as it always has. Racism, xenophobia and bigotry have no place in our community. We are proud to be part of a diverse and tolerant community in which every person is treated as an equal no matter where they are from, their race or heritage”.
Turning directly to Pullen, the company continued: “In light of recent events we have chosen to remove Mistabishi’s releases from our own store and direct any of Hospital Records’ income received from his publishing and releases on all other stores to our chosen charity: Love Music Hate Racism”.
Pullen subsequently issued a statement on his Facebook page, saying: “I shouldn’t have to apologise for my concerns about spiralling crime rates and social disintegration in my own neighbourhood and city but I’ll always apologise for causing offence”.
He then adds: “People who think like me are just a secondary condition of a much bigger problem that no one seems to want to deal with, but obviously it’s much easier to silence and contain that than the actual cause of it. I’ll keep my opinions to myself and hope to find some sort of inner peace with it all and try to concentrate on the positive aspects of where I live. Another round of humanitarian work is probably the one”.
