Calvin Harris has insisted he wasn’t to blame for Rita Ora's second album being scrapped.
The DJ dated the pop star for about a year until their split in 2014 and was then hit by claims he’d banned his ex from performing their collaborative track “I Will Never Let You Down” at the Teen Choice Awards that year and rumours of a personal and professional rift between the pair when Ora’s expected second album failed to appear at the time.
Some had suggested Harris might have refused to sign off on some songs they worked on together, but he’s now spoken out to insist the story is a “myth”.
A fan on Twitter suggested Ora could have been “one of the biggest pop stars in the world” if her second album hadn’t been “torpedoed” – and it prompted a terse response from the DJ, who wrote: “Entire thing is a myth, there is one unreleased song I worked on and it isn’t good.”
Speaking after their split, Ora opened up about the Teen Choice Awards drama in an interview with Ryan Seacrest on his radio show, saying: “For anybody who doesn’t understand how it works, he wrote and produced the song (‘I Will Never Let You Down’).
“So, he has to approve anything TV-wise … And obviously he owns the rights to it and he didn’t approve the Teen Choice Awards."
Harris later insisted he had his reasons for saying no to the request. After Ora spoke out, he tweeted: “You’ll only know one side of the story re:Teen Choice Awards because I choose not to talk to the papers about every aspect of my personal life. But just know I had a damn good reason.”
The former couple have since both moved on. Ora went on to release more music and is now married to director Taika Waititi, while Harris is engaged to TV and radio presenter Vick Hope.