2021: Astroworld
This one was the most recent and one of the deadliest live music events in the last decade, which left a lot of questions in its wake and a lot of grief. The event took place in November and the people who attended have told their horror stories, alongside videos and pictures on social media, showing just how bad the organization had been, signaling errors right from the beginning.
Travis Scott, the organizer, owner, and headliner of Astroworld, is known to incite the crowd at his concerts, oftentimes urging them to try to reach the stage and commit violent acts. However, he is not the only one responsible as videos of people storming the entrance barricades, pushing them to the ground, and storming in have surfaced, showing people stepping over others who tripped from the start. The organizers knew of this occurrence and did not think to strengthen security toward the start of Scott’s performance.
During the artist’s set, people started a stampede, pushing forwards and over others quite fast after the set started. This continued, with people being crushed against the front barricade or falling to the ground only to be stepped all over in the madness created. Testimonies show that it was hard to breathe with how many people crowded together. Despite the crowd signaling for the concert to stop and the police arriving and telling the promoter to halt it, Travis Scott continued his set for another 30 minutes, later claiming he had no idea what was going on.
Ten people, aged between 9 to 27, died from compression asphyxia, basically being crushed to death in the crowd, while another 300 had been injured, from the 50,000 people in the audience.
1990: Glastonbury Festival
Glastonbury Festival is possibly England’s best known music festival, and the 1990 edition was characterized by three days of almost constant rain, mud, “putrid latrines” and people almost dying from asphyxiation. That was due to then record-breaking amount of people attending in order to see The Cure, Sinéad O’Connor, and Adamski (also known as an acid guru) perform.
However, that is not what brought about the disaster for this festival, but rather what happened after. Travelers had been regular attendants of the festival ever since its inception in the 1970s, were given their own, free festival fields at the site’s border for years. However, in 1990 after the festival ended, they loitered around in order to go dumpster diving in the trash left behind from the event, which lead to a violent altercation between them and the festival’s security.
It got so violent that the altercation was compared to the post-apocalyptic film Mad Max and has earned the name “Battle of Yeoman’s Bridge”. The following year’s event was canceled in order to look into their security measures and every year they put up higher and higher fences to stop people from jumping over them.
