Fyre Festival set the bar high for festival failure, with sweaty cheese sandwiches and wilted salads that passed for meals, as well as insider accounts of the disastrous conditions on site quickly spreading. The organizers were so overwhelmed that they forgot to sign simple things like confidentiality agreements with employees. But Fyre is far from the only festival to stumble due to a combination of natural forces and human error. The following five festivals all had, to put it politely, difficult years – some recovered, while others collapsed like tents in the rain.
1. 1990: Glastonbury Festival, Pilton, England
In 1990, Britain’s best-known music festival consisted of “three days of mud, rain, stinking latrines and suffocating confines,” according to James Delingpole of the London Telegraph. The criticism was based on the circumstances surrounding the sodden terrain and the record-breaking crowds for the time – people had come to hear The Cure, Sinéad O’Connor and acid house guru Adamski.
But the real disaster occurred immediately after the festival: a group of travelers, itinerant citizens who had been a constant presence at the festival since the 1970s, had this year been given their own adjacent field to play music from bands like Ozric for free Tentacles and Hawkwind to offer. After the official show ended, they remained on site to pick through the abundant trash. The “trash diving” eventually led to a confrontation with security that was later referred to as the “Battle of Yeoman’s Bridge.” It became violent, according to one observer, “a bit like the Wild West in Mad Max.” Glastonbury went on hiatus the next year to overhaul its security arrangements and travelers were gradually expelled from Glastonbury.
2. 1999: Woodstock ’99, Utica, New York
From the start, Woodstock ’99 was more aggressive than its predecessor in 1969 and the anniversary edition of 1994. The festival followed the growing hard rock trend and presented a lineup that included thrash titans such as Metallica, up-and-coming nu-metal Bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit as well as politically charged bands like Rage Against the Machine counted. As Jenny Eliscu wrote in Rolling Stone, it was “representative of a generation that responded to the question, ‘What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?’ would like to respond with a punch.”
However, the long list of problems that the three-day festival brought with it was almost as long as the queues for the toilets: rising temperatures at Griffiss Air Force Base made water even more necessary, and those Those who had not brought supplies from home were shocked to be told that bottled water cost $4. Horrorcore duo Insane Clown Posse (who no doubt learned during this experience how not to introduce “Gathering of the Juggalos”) threw $100 bills into the crowd, causing a minor stampede. In the pre-RFID era, fake entry wristbands also existed, which meant the site was overcrowded. And: There were sexual assaults at the festival.
When the Red Hot Chili Peppers covered Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire,” some attendees took it as an invitation to light a fire. “Is it really surprising that Woodstock ’99 degenerated into senseless, aimless violence?” asked Toronto Star columnist Ben Rayer in his festival follow-up. “Not really. Almost every aspect of the festival – a program seething with anger, the location on a former nuclear weapons storage site, the clumsy omnipresence of commercial opportunism masquerading as rebellion, the alcoholic and narcotic self-obliteration, the Lord Of The Flies -like final hours of blazing, drum-driven anarchy – was as typical of the ’90s as love beads and long beards were of the ’60s.”
3. 2012: Isle of Wight, Newport, England
The rainstorms that flooded Britain in the summer of 2012 did not stop more than 55,000 people from attending the three-day festival – including Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen. However, the weather affected the journey: concert-goers who wanted to drive to the Isle of Wight were stuck in traffic that lasted long enough for them to take a nap in the car. 350 cars sank in the mud near the festival site, the Daily Mail reported, creating an eight-kilometer-long traffic jam and leading to 10-hour delays. Ferry passengers were also trapped due to problems docking the boats. After people arrived on the site, they had to pitch their tents in a sizable mass of mud. But from a musical perspective it was all wonderful – “in the midst of all the chaos there was a great festival,” wrote James Lachno in the London Telegraph.
4. 2012: Bloc Festival, London, England
The two-day Bloc Festival boasted an impressive roster of hip-hop stars like Snoop Dogg and DOOM, as well as DJs and producers like Flying Lotus and Ricardo Villaobos, but the execution left a lot to be desired. On the first day, people who had arrived relatively early waited in line for more than two hours, resulting in some climbing over the barriers. The bars ran out of beer around half past ten in the evening; the tents were packed surprisingly early. The first day, which one social media user described as a “car accident,” was declared over early, and the second day was ultimately canceled entirely: “We are all deeply saddened that this has happened, but everyone’s safety is on the line Terrain had priority,” said the organizers.
Part of the problem lay in ill-conceived infrastructure: the festival’s venue, the London Pleasure Gardens, had told organizers early on that a venue called The Hub with a capacity of 2,800 people would be ready in time for the event. However, those responsible withdrew this statement two weeks before the festival began; other areas of the Pleasure Gardens were not accessible to participants due to the upcoming Olympic Games and associated construction work. After a break of several years, Bloc returned with success in 2015, but in 2016 the creators announced that their festival days were over and they would focus on their London nightclub again.
5. 2015: TomorrowWorld, Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia
Although the 2015 lineup for the third edition of the US branch of the Belgian festival TomorrowLand promised big EDM DJs like Kaskade and David Guetta as well as a performance by Shaquille O’Neal, heavy rain marred the festival’s proceedings. The 3,200-acre site in Georgia quickly turned into a mud pit; On the second day, organizers decided to limit shuttle service back to Atlanta. (Those who didn’t camp had to hike home or find available Ubers – whose markup was reportedly up to 5.9 times higher than the normal rate).
On the third day of the festival, only those who were already there were able to enter the site, although that didn’t stop some from trying to gain access to the festival area despite the weather. Since then, TomorrowWorld has not returned to the US, although the Belgian edition is still scheduled for July.
This article was written by Maura Johnston and was translated into German by Kristina Baum. You can find the original here.