As the Woodstock ‘99 music festival burned to the ground, there was one Brit in the midst of all the chaos wondering what the hell he’d walked into: Fatboy Slim.
Set to play the headline set of the Saturday night at the 30th anniversary revival of the original peace ‘n’ love hippie festival based in upstate New York, it should have been one of the most momentous performances of his life. And while people are still talking about it 23 years later, unfortunately, it’s not for the reason he hoped.
As part of the new Netflix documentary series, Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99, Fatboy Slim – real name Norman Cook – describes exactly what happened on the night of his scariest ever set.
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The 400,000-odd crowd had been amped up by Limp Bizkit and had started tearing down the walls and destroying other podiums across the site, and this feral energy was headed for the late night entertainment of the rave hangar. From the off, it was full of people engaging in the most hedonistic of behaviour. In the documentary, one member of staff working that night said: “I remember shining my flashlight on the floor and literally seeing people on all fours having sex”, while another said it was more debauched than the dark room at Berghain: “I saw from the stage one wall of the hangar several naked people lined up with their hands up against a wall and a line of people behind them… which Biblical word for it would you like?”
Aptly, Cook launched into his set with Fucking In Heaven, and had only got a few tracks in when he noticed something large moving into the hangar. At first, Cook thought the van was just a cool part of the show, like the art cars at Burning Man, and said in the doc: “I thought it was a kind of floating dance platform, like a podium, with about 20 or 30 people on it which turned out to be a van.”
A van, it transpired, that a gang of people had stolen and were ploughing into the crowd.
He was told he needed to stop the music so they could get the van out of the hangar, and Cook admits to being gutted by the request: “Aw, not tonight,” he remembered thinking. “This is Woodstock!” The crowd did not take it well, and as was the theme of much of the rest of the festival, started pelting him with bottles, cups and other rubbish. “That was literally the moment when everything started to look a bit less fun,” he said.
When stage manager, A.J. Srybnik, finally got to the van, he found someone wielding a “rusty old” machete, and an unconscious teenage girl with her clothes pulled off alongside a boy pulling up his pants. “I was floored,” he said. “It literally took the life out of me.” He had just witnessed the aftermath of a sexual assault, and the girl was taken off in an ambulance.
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Stuck in a hellish scenario, Cook’s management made the decision to get him out of there. “Shit’s kicking off,” he said, “and it’s kind of not safe.” A car was sent for him and he was told to leave his records and get out as fast as he could. “There was adrenaline coming out of my ears. I did exactly what I was told and ran," he added. "We drove straight to an airport and slept in the airport until our flight the next day.”
Had he stayed, he would have seen the full-on violence and devastation of the Sunday night, where people went rampaging through the site, setting fire to and trashing everything they could get their hands on. There were also many more sexual assaults reported.
Cook is told about the true nature of what went on the rave hangar in the documentary series, presumably for the first time. Looking devastated, he says: “That is just hideous to think that in the midst of all those people having fun, and me wanting to make everyone love each other, that was going on literally under our noses.”
Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 is streaming on Netflix now.
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