The jaw-dropping tale of the festival that turned into Hell
You may think that Glastonbury, in its most sodden years, looks like a hellscape. Be prepared to revise that view when you watch Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 (Netflix), a music festival so catastrophic that it makes Glasto seem like a picnic at Glyndebourne.
At what point did Woodstock ’99 become marked for disaster? Perhaps it was when the organisers decided that, instead of the bucolic dairy farm that played host to the peace’n’love Woodstock of 1969, they would hire a decommissioned military base where 250,000 drunk and drugged-up young people would get off their nuts to Limp Bizkit.
At the beginning of day one, Tibetan monks performed a serene blessing ceremony inside one of the hangars. By the end of day three, the site was on fire, the acts had fled the site in terror, and the National Guard were introducing themselves to festivalgoers by means of a truncheon to the stomach. Footage of the aftermath could have been taken from a postapocalyptic horror film.
In theory, Trainwreck is Netflix’s successor to its documentary on Fyre Festival, but they’re different beasts. Fyre Festival was comedy schadenfreude from start to finish, as “influencers” with more money than sense splashed out on a luxury event in the Bahamas with villa accommodation and supermodels on tap, only to find themselves on a disaster relief campsite with processed cheese slices to eat.
Trainwreck isn’t funny (unless you count the mullet-haired Beavis and Butt-head-esque interviewee). It’s three episodes’ worth of jaw-dropping television, as you marvel at just how much worse things can get. Fyre Festival was competently organised when compared to this.
The narrative builds terrifically, with contributors from all sides giving their accounts of what went on. Organiser Michael Lang – co-creator of the original Woodstock – and promoter John Scher try to convince us it wasn’t their fault, while production crew describe their mounting horror. A security man recalls looking out at the mosh pit on the first night: “It was like the scene from Jaws – ‘I think we need a bigger boat.’”
Some of the artists appear on camera – Fatboy Slim, Gavin Rossdale from Bush, Jonathan Davis from Korn. The ones most guilty of whipping the crowd into an uncontrollable frenzy are notable by their absence. When the insane decision to hand every festivalgoer a candle ended – inevitably – in widespread arson, organisers begged Red Hot Chili Peppers to go out on stage and call for calm. They went on and played Fire by Jimi Hendrix.
The South Bank Show has been going for 44 years, and Melvyn Bragg shows few signs of weariness. He could have thrown in the towel when ITV cancelled the series back in 2010; instead he moved it to Sky Arts and continues to produce his unshowy, intelligent profile interviews. I prefer it to Alan Yentob’s Imagine strand, which does a similar thing but always with the sense that Yentob is interviewing a member of his own clique, and that their interviews are an extension of a dinner party chat.
The last in the current series was on Carlos Acosta, whose life story lends itself well to a biography such as this. Born into poverty in Havana, his father, Pedro, was a tough man who would beat him with the handle of a machete. One day Pedro saw a silent film featuring a ballet dancer and ordered his son, a talented breakdancer, to follow that path. As Acosta explained, with generosity: “Everything came from a place of love. He didn’t want me to end up like him, a truck driver, and he knew I had a winning ticket: my talent.”
Acosta enrolled at ballet school, which entailed 5am starts and four hours of travelling each day, and aged 16 won gold at the Prix de Lausanne. Footage of him dancing in that competition was mesmerising. From there, it was a glorious rise to principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. He retired from classical ballet in 2015 – and is now artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet while also running his own dance company in Cuba.
The most remarkable part of his story was his journey from Cuba, where the family barely had enough to eat. Invited to join the English National Ballet at 18, the culture shock was immense: “I realised that they pay you via this thing called a bank. They make a transfer and give you a credit card – things you take for granted, but for a Cuban guy it was another galaxy.”
Bragg’s questions were concise – “Can you talk a bit about the power of your father?” or, “Do you miss dancing?” – yet he elicited lengthy, sincere answers from his subject. Let us hope that a new series is in the planning, because programmes celebrating the arts are vanishingly few.
Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 ★★★★★ The South Bank Show ★★★★