A subway cellist who was bashed in the head during a Valentine’s Day performance in Manhattan says it’s too dangerous for him to keep playing music underground.
Iain Forrest, a medical student who performs electric cello as part of the MTA’s Music Under New York program, was playing in front of a crowd at the 34th St.-Herald Square station when a woman came up from behind him, grabbed his metal water bottle from the floor, and hit him in the head.
The unprovoked attack was caught on video. The woman, who wore a scarf to cover her face, leaned nonchalantly against a pillar, then rushed in to hit Forrest in the back of the head as he performed “Titanium” by Sia. He then hunched over in pain and grabbed his head while the woman ran off.
“I couldn’t quite get my bearings and it was only when I saw my metal water bottle rolling around on the ground and I saw the crowd’s face — in awe, disbelief and shock — that I realized, I think someone just smashed the back of my head with my metal water bottle,” Forrest, 29, told the Daily News.
His fans rushed to his aid and showed him videos from their phones.
“I was able to see for the first time, wow, this person did in fact smash my head with a bottle,” Forrest recounted. “An MTA worker then gave chase to them throughout the subway station and afterwards they told me when he came back that she had fled from the station aboveground.”
The woman changed clothes as she fled and ran into Macy’s, the cellist said.
Forrest, who goes by the nickname “Eyeglasses,” had to audition for his spot in the MTA’s performance program. He started doing subway shows about seven years ago.
But after this attack — and another assault in Times Square last May — the electric cello maestro said he’s done with underground music for the foreseeable future.
“I’ve performed at Radio City Music Hall. I’ve performed at Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden. Those are great. But there’s always something exciting about a spontaneous performance in the subway that fans catch,” he said.
“So it does kind of break my heart that this is something that has to stop indefinitely, barring some sort of systemic change with protection for performances in the subway.”
Forrest nearly pulled the plug last May after a man beat and choked him during a Times Square show and broke the battery to his cello.
“That’s a lot of money,” the suspect said before attacking Forrest and trying to steal his cash and instrument, according to cops.
Police arrested Rendell Robinson, 40, and charged him with robbery. The case against him is still pending, and he remains held at Rikers Island.
“I’ve got a wife. I’ve got a family and friends that care about me and I don’t know what they would do if I was gone,” Forrest said.
After the May incident, the NYPD assigned an officer to watch over him during performances and that encouraged him to keep going, he added.
“That was one or two months that they did that. Nothing really funny happened. But then that was apparently temporary and it was only protecting me. It wasn’t protecting other musicians from the program,” Forrest said. “And then here we are months later, this attack happened again to me, so at this point, I just made the very tough decision.”
Until the attacks, performing in the MTA program had been a joy, he said.
“That has been happening too much, and it’s almost been normalized as an acceptable ‘risk’ to essentially this occupation,” he said. “And I think that’s something that should be brought attention to and should be tracked better in terms of the numbers and where these things are happening.”
Forrest is an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and he often brings his music to his patients.
“I also have a lab where I develop new treatments, new therapeutics, new strategies for treating people and try to help them with clinical trials and other type of studies,” he said.
Police released a photo and video of his attacker on Friday, describing her as a woman with a light complexion, about 5-feet-3 with a slim build, wearing a brown fur coat, black winter hat, burgundy scarf and a multicolored bag across her body.
Cops are asking anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS.
