Today, 25 years ago, one of the worst accidents in rock history occurred at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark: nine young men lost their lives in the chaos that unfolded during a Pearl Jam concert.
Rasmus Thirup Beck, a journalist who attended the Pearl Jam concert in 2000 shared his memories with Danish TV on the anniversary:
“At some point, we see on the big screen that a completely lifeless body is lifted up over the barrier, and another one a little later and so on. We were completely shaken, and people began to cry around us and so on. We did not know what had happened. We only knew that something really bad had happened.”
During the show, frontman Eddie Vedder tried to get the thousands of fans to stop pushing forward, but it was too late. The US rock band have shared a post on Instagram honouring the victims. “Nothing has been the same since,” it reads.
Some 43 other people were also injured during the incident. Several inquiries were conducted, though no charges were filed.
An initial report published in December 2000 found that “a chain of unfortunate circumstances” led to the deaths after poor sound in the back prompted concert-goers to push forward.
‘How fragile we are’
After 30 June, 2000, Roskilde Festival and all other festivals around the world changed forever. The festival has invested millions of Kroner in modern safety measures in an effort to prevent something similar from happening again.
“We can be up to 70,000 people at this stage, and if we want space for all that, so that is still comfortable to stand here we will have to be able to use the corners completely, and therefore there is a much larger scene, big screens, a proper sound system, so it doesn’t really matter where you are, then you can still get a good experience,” explains head of security at the festival Morten Therkildsen.
A memorial sculpture now sits at the festival ground. It’s a black stone block engraved with the words “how fragile we are”, with nine trees planted around it. On Pearl Jam’s 2002 album Riot Act, the song Arc is a wordless tribute to the young men. The band played the song live only nine times.
