Break Stuff:Trainwreck:Woodstock '99.

"Everything is fucked, everybody sucks. You don't really know why but you want to justify rippin' someone's head off" - Break Stuff, Limp Bizkit

Crumbs! There was a lot of anger among the male youth of the United States in the late 1990s. To watch video footage of the Woodstock '99 festival (in Netflix's Trainwreck:Woodstock '99 - originally titled Clusterf**k - their asterisks, not mine) you could almost imagine that these are the exact same people who just over twenty years later were Donald Trump's footsoldiers during the January 6th insurrection on the Capitol Building.

Of course there's no evidence whatsoever for that but the sheer rage, the entitlement, and ever present threat of escalating violence certainly seem to be very similar. The death tolls, too, are fairly close. Three died at Woodstock '99. Five during, or after - but connected to, January 6th.

Netflix begin their look at what went wrong at the festival on the Monday morning. Surveying the site, in Rome, New York, one observer remarks that it looks like Bosnia - then a war zone. Another festival attendee describes it as like "Lord of the Flies" and, more succinctly, another observer remarks that everyone there was "high as balls".

Soon the story of how events unfolded is picked up by a selection of talking heads that includes MTV presenters, photographers, paramedics, journalists, security staff, festival goers (including a girl who was fourteen when she attended and a couple of lads who could easily pass as a real life Beavis and Butthead, the promoter John Scher, members of his team, festival founder Michael Lang (who was also co-founder of Woodstock '69), Fatboy Slim, Jewel, Gavin Rossdale of Bush, and Jonathan Davis of Korn.

The soundtrack mostly consists of acts who played at the festival but the likes of Blur, Blink 182, Finley Quaye, and The Mavericks may well baulk at being retroactively linked to the chaotic event. Not that the original Woodstock was without its problems but what it's remembered for now is peace, love, nudity, and flower power.

Out of those four things, Woodstock '99 only really managed nudity - and lots of it. It started with good intentions. Promoter Lang had been deeply affected by the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado earlier that year in which fifteen lives had been lost. He wanted to return to peace, love, and music.

He'd tried that five years earlier with Woodstock '94 and though fences had been pulled down and nobody made any money the event was generally considered enjoyable. This time though, they simply had to turn a profit and that's where the problems began. Or one of the places the problems began.

Initial signs that things may not go as planned came when the site chosen was, rather than the pleasant green rolling hills of somewhere like Glastonbury or Camp Bestival, a former air base (one that had only recently been decommissioned and looked as if it was still in use), Another clue came when the first festival goers arrived, in scorching heat, to have all their water confiscated by security.

The promoters had booked some of the biggest acts on the planet at the time (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Sheryl Crow, etc;) and this, of course, had attracted huge crowds. The attendance is believed to have been above 400,000. To give an idea of the scale of the event no lesser a man than James Brown was Friday's opening act.

Despite everything else, you have to admit that's some way to kick off a festival. Soon there were lots of naked people walking about, people watching BMX freestyle, Tibetan monks blessing the festival, a rave hangar for a dance tent, and people enthusiastically consuming drugs and booze. So far .... a pretty normal festival.

Sheryl Crow bravely handled the catcalls that came her way. To a shout of "show us your tits", she replied "you'll have to pay more than you paid to get in to see my tits" and lots of pissed up white frat boys jumped around topless in one hundred degree heat to The Offspring. Lots of whooping and hollering was going on in a way that seems almost unique to the young American man.

When Korn played the crowd was mind-bogglingly enormous and the mosh pit terrifyingly huge and aggressive. Arms and legs were broken and one observer remembers a waterfall of bodies (live ones) cascading over the security fences. It had not helped that the drinking water available on site was retailing at $4 a bottle (in 1999!) and that food was pretty much unaffordable.

When Bush followed Korn, the huge crowd began booing them before they even took the stage and, later, in the rave hangar the drugs and nudity became ever more prevalent. I'm not sure what it was with girls at American festivals flashing their boobs but I've been to lots of UK festivals and it just doesn't happen. If you went to see a pair of British boobs, you actually have to work quite hard at it!

Saturday morning saw festival goers wake up, if they'd slept at all, to a sea of filth and stories of multiple infrastructure breakdowns. Both sanitation and sewage costs had been cut so that the organisers could make money and the sea of mud people were sliding around was actually a mixture of mud and human shit.

The free drinking water that had been made available was 'tinted' brown too. One punter was identified by medical staff as having 'trench mouth'. Wyclef Jean summoned up the spirit of Jimi Hendrix with a guitar deconstruction of The Star Spangled Banner and asked the crowd to throw their plastic bottles at  him - which they did with gusto - before violently smashing his guitar up.

That's the dude from The Fugees! On the hottest day of the year, Kid Rock, another popular draw, turns up wearing a fur coat. An unusual choice of outfit as by that point over one thousand people had been treated for heat exhaustion and dehydration.

The MTV presenters who were introducing the bands had come to symbolise all that was going wrong with music (pop acts like The Backstreet Boys and a general sense of corporate takeover) and soon they became a target for the flying bottles. As well as the flying coins, batteries, and even rocks.

The security, or Peace Patrol, couldn't do much about it. Most of them were teenagers with no experience in security whatsoever and some of them were busy posing with topless women, getting stoned, and lying that their Peace Patrol jackets gave them backstage access before selling them for $400!

Sheryl Crow wasn't the only woman or girl at Woodstock '99 to receive abuse and many had it a lot worse. Large mobs of men surrounded women, pushed them around, and groped them. Those who were passed along the top of the crowd, including the fourteen year old mentioned earlier, felt male hands in places where they were certainly not welcome. It was to get worse.

The main attraction on Saturday were Limp Bizkit whose biggest song at the time was Nookie (it wasn't about Roger de Courcey's ventriloquist act) but it was the anthem to destruction Break Stuff that was to finally cause the crowd to tip over to the next level of anarchy.

The sound tower was invaded, plywood was ripped down and turned into boards for surfing the crowds - Bizkit's Fred Durst himself had a go, and soon the medical centre resembled a war hospital. In the wake of the Astroworld disaster it is now common for acts to pause performing if there's any chance of fans getting hurt but in 1999 that wasn't how things went so Limp Bizkit played on. The gig of their lives.

Later in the rave hanger, Fatboy Slim (who'd been backstage and was pretty much unaware of how fucked up things had got) started his set with Fucking In Heaven and the crowd took that as literally as they did Break Stuff. Reports of drugged up punters smashing their heads into the ground and lines of people openly fucking in the middle of the crowd.

Just before 2am, someone (completely off their heads) drove a van into the crowd. There were about twenty odd people dancing on the roof but when the back door of the van was open there was a far more distressing scene. A girl, about fifteen years old, who had clearly just been raped and a man pulling his pants back up.

The festival continued with the likes of Scher and Lang denying any accountability for events and assessing Woodstock '99 to be, so far, 'satisfying'. As many vendors ran out of stock and those left with supplies trebled their prices (bottles of water now going for $12), the crowd were treated to the rather odd appearance of Willie Nelson singing Amazing Grace!

Though about half the attendees had left by this point, exhausted - broken - fed up of being ripped off - fed up of being sexually abused, the others stayed as rumours swirled round the site that a secret set by a very big artist was to bring the weekend to a close. Guns'n'Roses, Prince, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, and even Michael Jackson were all mentioned.

As Jewel (one of very few female acts booked to play) delivered an awkward and uncomfortable set and then get off site as quickly as possible the promoters were still giving press conferences calling the festival a 'success' it soon became apparent there was no major surprise to end the festival and the final act would be, as advertised, the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I've always had them down to be one of the shittest bands that ever existed and watching Flea bollock naked and the rest of their band delivering their turgid funk-rock did nothing to divest me of that belief. What I hadn't realised though, was just how much of a cunt Anthony Kiedis was - and very possibly still is.

The festival organisers, quite remarkably bearing in mind all that had happened, handled out 100,000 candles to those still left so they could hold a vigil to the lives lost at Columbine and other shootings. When RHCP played Under The Bridge these wishes were respected and you could, at a push - if you ignore everything that had happened previously, call it quite moving.

Kiedis was told he had to do something to quell likely violence in the crowds. Instead, he led his band through a cover of Jimi Hendrix's Fire and, as so often at this event, the audience took the song all too literally. 

One huge fire started, then another, then another. Soon huge parts of the festival site were ablaze as one wilful act of arson followed another. Mobs rampaged the site singing "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me", ATM machines were smashed open and the money stolen, the festival staff barricaded themselves in their office, and at least two lorries exploded.

It was quite a way to end a festival but it's not something I'd like to have witnessed live and I'd certainly not have wanted any female I know to have been there. One thing Trainwreck:Woodstock '99 skirts round, though, is WHY this is all got so fucked up.

Across its three episodes the blame is passed between MTV, US culture, the films Fight Club and American Pie, the 90s, a general feeling of there not being enough love in the world, and, most tellingly, the promoters not giving a shit about their customers and treating them as mere cash cows.

You treat people like animals. Soon enough some of them will behave like animals. What's perhaps strangest of all, however, is at the end of the film many of those who attended described Woodstock '99 as the best time of their lives and said, if they could, they'd do it all over again. People eh? What the fuck are we like?