Thin-skinned Radiohead star Thom Yorke flounced off the stage during a show in Melbourne on Wednesday night after being heckled by a single pro-Palestine protester in a crowd of thousands. Yorke has long been a target of criticism from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, owing to his band having regularly played in Israel. Yorke, who has described the BDS movement as a “cultural ban,” was interrupted by a man in the crowd yelling at him about “the Israeli genocide of Gaza,” shouting that half the dead “were children.” Rather than making use of the array of sound amplification technology at his disposal to drown out the lone individual, Yorke stopped playing and said: “Come up here and say that. Right here, come on. Hop up on the f---ing stage and say what you wanna say. Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it. You want to p--s on everybody’s night?” The protester, thus encouraged to speak his mind, continued to do so, to which Yorke responded, “OK, you do it, see you later, then,” and walked offstage to astonished boos from the crowd. He returned a few minutes later and performed his final song of the evening, Radiohead’s 1997 hit “Karma Police.” The Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne can accommodate 13,000 fans and had sold out.
