Kanye West demands hummus and water bottles with the labels removed

It’s part of his new work out plan

Abbas Kazmi Asparagus Kanye West Oxford Guild YeezOx

Wacky rapper Kanye West requested hummus, raw asparagus and Volvic water bottles without the labels when he came to Oxford.

Guild Chairman Abbas Kazmi has revealed the extent of Yeezy’s diva demands when he was here to lecture students on Monday.

He told The Tab: “He wanted Volvic water bottles with the labels removed, a small veggie platter, hummus, hot water and a small variety of tea bags, double espresso available to be made if requested, and raw asparagus.”

“He asked for a full sized mirror too. We couldn’t buy one at short notice, Argos said we had to order it in. So one girl on committee just had to carry hers out of her room!”

Yum

We caught up with Abbas after the show-stopping event to ask him what meeting Kanye was like. “He’s an interesting guy. It was bizarre: he walked around – he didn’t want to do photos with the committee, which is fair enough – then he went in to talk.

“At the end, I saw him walk past and he had the biggest childish grin. When he said ‘That’s all.’, class dismissed type-thing and walked out we thought he was going to come back in. But I knew when I was looking at his grin that this was classic Kanye.”

Kanye, imma let you finish but…

We asked Abbas how the Guild managed to secure Kanye, arguably the biggest speaker Oxford’s had in a decade.

Abbas managed to secure the biggest speaker Oxford has ever had a few months ago. He said: “I was in London and saw a big crowd for him at St Paul’s, so decided we’d ask. I personalised an invitation, and said that we could work around his schedule – ‘literally anytime you want’. We sent this out two Fridays ago, and got a reply 10 minutes after sending it saying he was interested.

“We kept it a secret from most of our own committee – they found out the same time as the rest of the world. We got the go ahead from Kanye’s people to announce less than 14 hours before the event.

“The reason we kept it secret is because there’s a big difference between confirmed and expressed interest. We didn’t want to raise our hopes or anyone else’s hopes too much, especially with someone this big. I was trying to stop myself being too excited myself because this could all still have fallen through.”

Event of the year/decade/millennium/history of Oxford

Securing a venue at such late notice was tricky, Abbas explained. “They told us at 5.30pm on Saturday that it was going to be on Monday – which is after all the venues are shut. We had preemptively put a reserve on the Natural History Museum, but it was initially supposed to have been last Thursday when we had a reserve on the Sheldonian, which was 900 people. But by Saturday all the big ones were booked up, so on Monday we went for the Natural History. Credit has to go to Kanye’s team and the committee for helping us to make this work at such short notice.”

Look at that grin

Yeezy’s demands stretched to more than just edibles: he has a policy where everything has to be approved by him personally.

“I wrote a press release for him, and it took him four hours to adjust, but all that he adjusted was the paragraph describing Kanye West: he just removed it. I guess he didn’t want an introduction – he probably thought everyone would know who he was, and he was right.”

And there’s good news for students: Ye was just the start of the Guild’s huge speaker lineup. “We were negotiating with Ne-Yo and Ludacris this term but put them on hold when we got Kanye. I can give you a hint for next term too: we’ll have a lot of big names from the fashion industry.”