The pro-Palestine BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement has called for a boycott of Radiohead’s newly announced 2025 tour.
Earlier today (September 3), the band confirmed a run of UK and European live shows for November and December, their first dates in over seven years. They will play multiple dates each in Madrid, Bologna, London’s O2, Copenhagen and Berlin. Fans can apply for tickets by registering on Radiohead’s website here from Friday (September 5).
Shortly after the announcement, the BDS movement’s social media pages shared a message from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which argued that the band’s “complicit silence” and support of Israeli performers during the “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza” should lead to a boycott of the shows.
“Even as Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza reaches its latest, most brutal and depraved phase of induced starvation, Radiohead continues with its complicit silence, while one member repeatedly crosses our picket line, performing a short drive away from a livestreamed genocide, alongside an Israeli artist that entertains genocidal Israeli forces,” an Instagram post read.
“Palestinians reiterate our call for the boycott of Radiohead concerts, including its rumoured tour, until the group convincingly distances itself, at a minimum, from Jonny Greenwood’s crossing of our peaceful picket line during Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
NME have contacted Radiohead’s representatives for comment.
In May 2024 and again in March this year, Greenwood played a show with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa in Tel Aviv, while a pair of UK performances from the duo scheduled for June were cancelled following a backlash from pro-Palestinian campaigners.
PACBI have said those shows’ cancellation came about after “peaceful BDS pressure, given the artists’ clear and irrefutable links to whitewashing Israel’s genocide in Gaza that has killed at least 62,000 Palestinians.”
Greenwood said in a statement after the cancellations: “The venues and their blameless staff have received enough credible threats to conclude that it’s not safe to proceed.”
“Forcing musicians not to perform and denying people who want to hear them an opportunity to do so is self-evidently a method of censorship and silencing,” he continued. “Intimidating venues into pulling our shows won’t help achieve the peace and justice everyone in the Middle East deserves. This cancellation will be hailed as a victory by the campaigners behind it, but we see nothing to celebrate and don’t find that anything positive has been achieved.”
The new PACBI post also said: “Dudu Tassa has repeatedly entertained genocidal Israeli forces in between these massacres of Palestinians in Gaza, willingly acting as a cultural ambassador for apartheid Israel.”
Radiohead also encountered a backlash in 2017 when they played a show in Tel Aviv despite protests urging them not to. Figures including Roger Waters, Thurston Moore, Young Fathers and Archbishop Desmond Tutu all signed an open letter from Artists For Palestine UK pressuring them to back out of the show. Today, PACBI said Radiohead had “yet to apologise” for playing the show.
Thon Yorke later responded to the controversy by stating: “Playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government. We don’t endorse Netanyahu any more than Trump.”
Yorke also clashed with a protester during a solo show in Melbourne last October. When a pro-Palestinian campaigner in the audience shouted out at the stage, the frontman said: “Come up and say that, right here. Come up on the fucking stage and say what you want to say. But don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it.” Yorke then walked off stage.
In May, Yorke shared a lengthy post in which he attempted to explain his stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“Some guy shouting at me from the dark last year when I was picking up a guitar to sing the final song alone in front of 9000 people in Melbourne didn’t really seem like the best moment to discuss the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza,” Yorke began. “Afterwards I remained in shock that my supposed silence was somehow being taken as complicity, and I struggled to find an adequate way to respond to this and to carry on with the rest of the shows on the tour.”
“That silence, my attempt to show respect for all those who are suffering and those who have died, and to not trivialise it in a few words, has allowed other opportunistic groups to use intimidation and defamation to fill in the blanks, and I regret giving them this chance. This has had a heavy toll on my mental health,” he continued, before stating that his music should be enough of an indication to prove he “could not possibly support any form of extremism or dehumanisation of others”.
He said Netanyahu was “totally out of control” and the “international community should put all the pressure it can on them to cease”, while arguing that “the unquestioning Free Palestine refrain that surrounds us all does not answer the simple question of why the hostages still have not all been returned? For what possible reason?”
Some criticised Yorke’s comments, including Reggie Watts, who said he was “disappointed to see that Thom’s statement centers his hurt feelings and frames his fans’ demands for him to speak up as a “social media witch hunt,” instead of recognizing the urgency of their call for him to speak out against the world-historical humanitarian crisis in Palestine.”
Around the time of the 2017 show, Yorke also got into a Twitter altercation with director Ken Loach over the show, when the latter asked the members whether they would “stand with the oppressed or the oppressor?”
Last year, guitarist Ed O’Brien wrote: “Like so many of you I have found the events of October 7 and what has followed too awful for words.. anything that I have tried to write feels so utterly inadequate. Ceasefire now. Return the hostages.”
Radiohead began teasing their 2025 shows this week, with a series of flyers popping up in the cities they’ll be visiting.
The group’s most recent live performance took place on August 1, 2018 at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. It marked the end of their ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ tour in support of their 2017 album of the same name – which they have yet to follow up.
