Billie Eilish has once again temporarily stopped one of her live shows in order to check on the safety of her crowd.
While performing at Madison Square Garden in New York City over the weekend, Eilish told her fans: “If you want to sit down, you are allowed. Go ahead, sit down, take a breath.”
As shown in footage obtained by TMZ, the singer also asked her fans at the front to “take a step back and give everybody some room down here”.
This followed a similar incident at an Eilish concert in Atlanta, Georgia, which saw an audience member suffer a medical emergency.
Eilish halted her performance so that the fan could access an inhaler. “Can we just grab one?” she asked a crew member. Another clip saw Eilish being met with cheers after saying: “I wait for people to be OK until I keep going.”
Her second remark was interpreted by some to refer to Travis Scott, whose Astroworld 2021 headline show resulted in a fatal crowd crush that killed 10 fans and injured hundreds.
Kanye West, who is headlining Coachella alongside Eilish and Harry Styles in April, took to Instagram afterwards to ask Eilish to “apologise” to Scott while sharing a screenshot of an article that accused her of “dissing” the latter artist at one of her recent shows.
Responding later in the comments section, Eilish said that she “literally never said a thing about Travis”.
The grandparents of nine-year-old Ezra Blount – who died as a result of suffering critical injuries at Astroworld – were among those to subsequently criticise West’s Instagram post.
“To hear Kanye’s words, that’s hurtful to us. What an idiotic thing to say,” Ezra’s grandfather Bernon Blount said.
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