Watch Turnstile's Brendan Yates stage dive during the band's Tiny Desk Concert performance
NPR have officially decreed the frontman's leap from the eponymous desk is the long-running series' first ever stage dive.

NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts have seen a lot of action since their inception in 2008 but Turnstile brought a first with their performance for the online video series, which came out this week. Frontman Brendan Yates has been certified by NPR as executing the show’s very first stage-dive, throwing himself off of the eponymous desk and into the arms of the watching NPR staffers, who held him aloft before returning him back onto the desk.
Some bands use their Tiny Desk stop-off to strip down their sound but, as is their way, Turnstile went in the other direction, arriving with a horn section to beef up their already quite beefy sonics and going in hard. The NPR staff respond by getting a very commendable moshpit going.
Yates’ stage-dive took place during Birds, the final song of the Baltimore hardcore outfits’ five-song set, which also included Dreaming, Sunshower, I Care and Never Enough, all of the songs pulled from their acclaimed fourth record Never Enough, which came out in June this year.
Yates will have a slightly bigger crowd to leap into when Turnstile visit the UK and Ireland for their biggest tour yet in November, the quintet stopping off in Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester and London as part of a European tour. Watch the Tiny Desk performance in full below:
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Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he's interviewed some of the world's biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.
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