Faith No More Cares A Lot About Pussy Riot

Five women wearing Pussy Riot's signature colorful balaclavas kept the crowd warm in between rock band Faith No More's sets last night in Moscow.

As Mike Patton and company left the stage for a break, five women wearing knit masks and brandishing signal flares walked on stage and started chanting antigovernment slogans and calling for the release of jailed members of the punk rock group.

The act was quite clearly sanctioned by Faith No More, as security did nothing to stop the women. After the set break, the headliners returned to the stage wearing the same headwear and Pussy Riot T-shirts and played their first hit song "We Care A Lot."

WATCH: Pussy Riot Members Take The Stage


The women asked people in the crowd to gather in front of Moscow's Tagansky Court on July 4 to protest the ongoing pretrial detention of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina on charges of hooliganism.

Pyotr Verzilov, an activist with the art collective Voina -- which has loose ties to Pussy Riot -- told RFE/RL's Russian Service that the members of the band appeared at the request of Faith No More.
"Faith No More, as well as a huge number of musicians in Russia and abroad, are enraged over what happened to the three arrested members of Pussy Riot," Verzilov said. "Before coming to Russia, the musicians requested a joint appearance with [free members of] Pussy Riot."

Verzilov said Pussy Riot has an anonymous and "interchangeable" membership, adding that about a few dozen people have participated in the band's various performances.

Yana Kalimulina, a spokeswoman for the club, told RFE/RL's Russian Service that just before the concert Faith No More insisted that the women appear on stage -- making it a precondition for playing the concert. She said the original arrangement was for them to provide backup vocals and that club officials were surprised when they appeared on stage with their banner.

Kalimulina added that, after the concert, when officials from the club went backstage to speak to the women from Pussy Riot, they were already gone.

"They somehow managed to escape unnoticed," she said.

The three members of Pussy Riot have been in custody since February, after they staged a high-profile protest concert in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral. Their detention has been extended several times already, most recently on June 20 when the Tagansky Court judge ordered that the band members could be held until July 24.


-- Zach Peterson and RFE/RL's Russian Service