Radiohead and the Smile singer Thom Yorke paused a recent solo concert in Melbourne, Australia, after being heckled by a pro-Palestine member of the audience. Footage from the concert shows a man shouting about the death tolls in Israel’s war in Gaza and asking Yorke, “How could you be silent?” (The Israeli offensive, in Gaza, has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.)
Yorke, further footage shows, addressed the man in the audience: “Come up on the fucking stage and say what you want to say. Don’t stand there like a coward. Come here and say it.” He continued, “You want to piss on everybody’s night? Come on. OK, you do, see you later.” Yorke then left the stage, but he returned to play Radiohead’s “Karma Police.”
Yorke and Radiohead were criticized heavily, in 2017, for performing in Israel. Yorke dismissed the backlash to the Tel Aviv concert, and he wrote, “Playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government. We’ve played in Israel for over 20 years through a succession of governments, some more liberal than others. As we have in America. We don’t endorse [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America.”
Jonny Greenwood, Yorke’s bandmate in Radiohead and the Smile, has also recently defended his work with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa after the pro-Palestine Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement said that he was “artwashing genocide” by performing, with Tassa, in Tel Aviv amid Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza.
Greenwood—whose wife is the Israeli artist Sharona Katan and who released the album Jarak Qaribak, with Dudu Tassa, last year—wrote that “no art is as ‘important’ as stopping all the death and suffering around us.” He continued, “But doing nothing seems a worse option. And silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel doesn’t seem like any way to reach an understanding between the two sides of this apparently endless conflict.”