Charlie Simpson: 'UK riots weren't political'

Charlie Simpson has said that there was no political motivation for last week's UK riots.

The Busted and Fightstar star lost 10,000 copies of his debut solo album Young Pilgrim in the Sony DADC/PIAS warehouse fire in Enfield, North London on Monday night.

Simpson told Metro: "It's not like when you see rifts in other parts of the world like Greece and stuff - there's political motivation there.

"With these riots, there is no political motivation - it's literally just mindless criminality. That's quite shocking and there's absolutely no excuse for people's livelihoods to be ruined and we've seen people's homes been destroyed."

He added of the fire: "It was really gutting. I saw it on the TV but didn't realise it was the PIAS warehouse and then I suddenly realised and my manager rang me in the morning and said, 'We have a real problem here'.

"For the first few hours on Tuesday, we thought we'd have to delay the release as we didn't think we'd have enough stock to go to retails.

"It's upsetting for all the people who worked so hard to sort it out and then suddenly the record label had so much more work to do and frantically run around."

Fellow musicians Massive Attack have insisted that the UK riots were political, while Speech Debelle suggested that "oppression" and "police brutality" were the spark for the disturbances.

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Watch Charlie Simpson perform 'Sundown' exclusively for Digital Spy below: