Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke stormed out of a show after clashing with an anti-Israel protester — calling the heckler a “coward” who should come up onstage and say it to his face.
The British rocker confronted the protester towards the end of his solo show in Melbourne late Wednesday when the unidentified man abused him for not condemning the “Israeli genocide of Gaza,” footage from fellow concert-goers shows.
“Come up here and say that, right now,” Yorke, 56, shot back as cheering fans backed up the crooner.
“Come up on the f–king stage and say what you want to say. Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it.”
“Come on. You want to p–s on everybody’s night? OK, you do, see you later then,” he added.
The indie rocker then abruptly took off his guitar and left the stage, the footage shows.
Distraught fans could be heard screaming “No!” and “We love you Thom” as they drowned out the protestor.
One furious fan raged at the protester, “Shut the f–k up, man.”
The full extent of the protester’s remarks wasn’t immediately clear from the clip but he could be heard shouting about “the Israeli genocide of Gaza” and questioned “how many dead children will it take.”
One concert-goer told the BBC the heckler was hauled out by security but continued to engage with people outside the venue.
Yorke, meanwhile, returned a few minutes later to belt out a final song — Radiohead’s 1997 hit “Karma Police.”
Yorke, as well as his Radiohead bandmates, have taken heat in the past for refusing to cancel a 2017 show in Tel Aviv — despite calls for a boycott from the pro-Palestine campaign by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
“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.”
