Thom Yorke, the frontman of Radiohead, stormed offstage at his Melbourne concert on Wednesday after having a heated exchange with a pro-Palestinian heckler in the crowd.
The unidentified man began yelling at the rock star toward the end of his show about not condemning the "Israeli genocide of Gaza," the New York Post reports. Video footage from concertgoers showed Yorke confronting the man through the microphone, saying "Come up here and say that right now. Come up on the f*cking stage and say what you want to say. Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it."
After an inaudible response, the 56-year-old British musician fired back, "Come on. You want to p*ss on everybody’s night? OK, you do, see you later then," before walking off the stage with his guitar.
Fans in the crowd could also be heard in the video shouting "No, we love you Thom" and "Shut the f*ck up, man," directed toward the heckler. One of the people in the audience told BBC that the man was escorted out of the venue by security but continued to harass people outside.
Yorke returned to the stage a few minutes later to play one final song, "Karma Police."
Radiohead had previously received backlash from the pro-Palestinian campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for refusing to cancel a Tel Aviv show in 2017.
“There’s an awful lot of people who don’t agree with the BDS movement, including us. I don’t agree with the cultural ban at all,” Yorke told Rolling Stone at the time. “I would never dream of telling [people] where to work or what to do or think . . . It’s deeply disrespectful to assume that we’re either being misinformed or that we’re so retarded we can’t make these decisions ourselves. I thought it was patronizing in the extreme.”
The unidentified man began yelling at the rock star toward the end of his show about not condemning the "Israeli genocide of Gaza," the New York Post reports. Video footage from concertgoers showed Yorke confronting the man through the microphone, saying "Come up here and say that right now. Come up on the f*cking stage and say what you want to say. Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it."
After an inaudible response, the 56-year-old British musician fired back, "Come on. You want to p*ss on everybody’s night? OK, you do, see you later then," before walking off the stage with his guitar.
Fans in the crowd could also be heard in the video shouting "No, we love you Thom" and "Shut the f*ck up, man," directed toward the heckler. One of the people in the audience told BBC that the man was escorted out of the venue by security but continued to harass people outside.
Yorke returned to the stage a few minutes later to play one final song, "Karma Police."
Radiohead had previously received backlash from the pro-Palestinian campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for refusing to cancel a Tel Aviv show in 2017.
“There’s an awful lot of people who don’t agree with the BDS movement, including us. I don’t agree with the cultural ban at all,” Yorke told Rolling Stone at the time. “I would never dream of telling [people] where to work or what to do or think . . . It’s deeply disrespectful to assume that we’re either being misinformed or that we’re so retarded we can’t make these decisions ourselves. I thought it was patronizing in the extreme.”
