Turkish Radiohead Fans Attacked At Album-Listening Party

Music is meant to bring people together, to cross all boundaries of race and religion. Unfortunately, not everyone understands such a thing, and for a handful of Turkish Radiohead fans, this hatred and violence was experienced first hand.

A group of Islamic men attacked a group of Radiohead fans on Friday night at an album-listening party, simply because the fans were listening to music and drinking alcohol during the holy month of Ramadan. Reportedly, the group of men rushed into the Velvet Indieground record store in Istanbul, Turkey and used steel pipes, among other weapons, to beat the attendees.

Goddamnit...

“Our hearts go out to those attacked tonight at Velvet IndieGround in Istanbul,” Radiohead said in response to these attacks. “We hope that someday we will be able to look back on such acts of violent intolerance as things of the ancient past. For now, we can only offer our fans in Istanbul our love and support.”

At the time of writing, it is unknown as to the severity of the individual injuries, but thankfully, no deaths have been reported.

Since the incident on Friday night, a rally was held just last night in protest over the previous night's attacks (shown above). Sadly, it's been reported that Seogu Lee, the owner of the store, has been hit with an eviction notice following the attacks.

You can find amateur footage of the incident here.

Lee posted to Reddit recently, stating that, “I am the person that’s speaking in that video. I am the owner of that periscope account. They were determined to kill us. We were beaten by more than 20 men with pipes in their hands, beer bottles were broken on our heads. I don’t even know how we made it out. I will share the details later guys, just hoping that no one will die.”

Radiohead is currently running these global listening parties in support of their new album, 'A Moon Shaped Pool'. These events include games, limited-edition vinyl, curated playlists and much more.

We can only hope that no more violence comes from these events, as it's a damn shame that these types of things still happen.