“What will happen in the next five minutes has nothing to do with music. Vedder stopped the music and addressed the audience: Pearl Jam were coming to the end of “Daughter” when Adams rushed onstage and talked to singer Eddie Vedder. Eventually, the message went up the security team’s chain of command to the Orange Stage production office and finally to Dick Adams, Pearl Jam’s tour manager, who was standing at the side of the stage. Pete Townshend Returns to Form on Reflective Single 'Can’t Outrun the Truth'Īt about 11:15 P.M., forty-five minutes into Pearl Jam’s set, Per Johansen turned to his security chief in the pit and asked her to stop the music, telling her, “I think people are dead.” Johansen claims he repeated his request twice and that another member of the pit crew said it a fourth time. I stayed five songs, and then I pushed my way out.” People wanted to get to the front, and put their hands on each other’s shoulders and squeezed through. “It was like I was standing at a crossroads. “There was too much pressure in there,” he recalls. Jannik Tai Mosholt, 22, a devoted Pearl Jam fan and a veteran of seven Roskilde festivals, was about ten rows from the front, on the right flank of the crowd. The tight squeeze and oceanic surges proved too much for some members of the audience. “Half an hour in, I knew it was life and death. “It was tight even before the music started – people were stumbling left and right,” says Tomas Miller, 19, who was also at the front of the crowd. The guy in front of me could see the problems they had and said, ‘Push the other way.’ We did that three times, but it didn’t help at all.” “I could still see their head, but they were much lower than the rest of us. Christian Mueller, 28, was in the audience near Johansen’s station, about fifteen feet from the stage. But the centrifugal sway of the packed fans was knocking people off balance and down to the hardclay pavement underneath, where arms, legs and heads were getting caught in a lethal tangle. The Roskilde Festival – one of Europe’s most popular summer concert events, held for the past twenty-nine years in the small farming community of Roskilde, twenty-five miles west of Copenhagen – had become the scene of one of the worst concert-related death tolls in rock history, just two short of the tragic stampede at the Who concert at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum in December 1979.Īccording to one eyewitness who was onstage, it was hard for anyone, including the band, to see what was happening in the pit, other than the usual exuberant tumult. A ninth man died in a hospital five days later. Eight young men, ages seventeen to twenty-six, suffocated to death in the mosh pit as Pearl Jam performed. Within an hour, the area directly in front of Johansen had turned into a rock & roll hell. “We’d had that crowd before,” he notes, “and there was no problem.” But not dangerous.” Johansen, 37, had done security at Roskilde for the past ten years. The size of the audience, Johansen says now, was “nothing special.
A volunteer security guard at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival, Johansen took up his assigned position in the narrow pit between the crowd barrier and the Orange Stage, the largest of the festival’s seven performance areas, and looked out at the approximately 50,000 fans waiting to see Pearl Jam. Kurt smiled: It was reverse psychology at its finest.On Friday, June 30th, at 10:15 P.M., Per Johansen reported for duty. We don't want to see a Wall of Death here!" Meanwhile, the Super Mario Gameboy theme sounded off. "I know that it's forbidden to officially organize a Wall of Death in the crowd. Like Bischoff, he tried to prevent the whole thing-sort of. In addition to the Thuringians, the Heimorgel-playing solo entertainer Mambo Kurt spoke out against the Wall of Death. "We don't want to see any Walls of Death at all," he said, as people started getting in position. This year, singer Marcus Bischoff tried to sway the clash of willing bodies. I was there myself, and I've never experienced anything of greater caliber since.
In 2011, they unofficially set the world record for the biggest Circle Pit ever at Wacken. Their sullen metalcore breaks so hard but remains so melodic that they're generally regarded as one of the most diverse headbangers. But there was one band on the lineup who always guarantees the strongest mosh pit at every festival: Heaven Shall Burn.
Organizers of the event even asked the bands to tell their audiences not to enact one, especially considering the massive amount of attendees. The Wall of Death is actually a high security risk for megafestivals like Germany's Wacken Open Air.
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