Woodstock ‘99 was meant to be a celebration of thirty years since the legendary Woodstock music festival in 1969, instead, it was a total shit show, and Fatboy Slim was right in the middle of the pure chaos.
A new Netflix documentary about the festival-gone-wrong has just been released and Fatboy Slim, real name Norman Cook, gave one hell of an interview for it.
With a crowd of 400,000 expected over three days, festival organisers messed up and found themselves understaffed, underresourced, and completely out of their depth.
With not enough food, water, or toilets to compensate for the hundreds of thousands of rowdy festival-goers, things went to shit pretty quick.
With most people in the crowd already upset, things reached the point of no return during Limp Biskit’s performance of ‘Break Stuff’ on the third night of the festival.
Fans were climbing scaffolding, tearing fences and anything they could apart, and just wreaking absolute havoc.
While this was going on, Fatboy was in his dressing room getting ready to headline the ‘rave hangar’, completely unaware of the pandemonium going on outside.
“I’d been closeted in my dressing room all afternoon with people just going, oh it’s a bit chaotic out there,” he said.
“But no one had told me there’d been any damage, that there’d been violence.”
Once he started his set, he only managed to get a few songs in before shit hit the fan.
“I became aware of something that I thought was a kind of dancing platform, like a podium, with about 20 - 30 people on it, which turned out to be a van,” he recalled.
Yea, a fucking van was driving through a packed crowd.
Eventually, the crowd started biffing bottles, rocks, and batteries at Slim which made him make the decision to dip.
“That was literally the moment when everything started to look a bit less fun,” he said.
Jeezus that is messed up.
