English musician Dolly Mavies is speaking out after she and her band garnered worldwide attention for walking out on their own show last month, after hearing Vice President JD Vance might be there.
Mavies, whose real name is Molly Davies, told the BBC that this exposure, following her posting about the 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.”
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Others accused the folk-rock singer 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 Daylesford Organic, a farm shop known as “the poshest shop in Britain,” 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 spent their vacation at an $11,000-per-week manor house to the Cotswolds, an elite region of England frequented by the likes of David and Victoria Beckham and King Charles. Someone familiar with Vance denied to the BBC that the vice president ever visited the pricey shop, which sells $1,100 food baskets, despite local news reporting that he was there.
But Mavies wasn’t the only one upset by the second family’s presence in the Cotswolds. Residents of the area, which is regularly referred to as the “Hamptons of England,” complained that the Vances’ visit left them “completely sealed off from the outside world,” according to a Telegraph article.
Jeremy Clarkson, famed host of such hit shows as Top Gear and Amazon Prime’s The Grand Tour, 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 series 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.
The vice president was also turned away from dining at The Bull, an early 16th-century countryside pub in Charlbury, Oxfordshire, when staff members staged a mutiny by threatening to boycott work if management accepted Vance’s dining reservation. Former VP Kamala Harris had reportedly dined at the same establishment just a few weeks previously without incident.
