![]() When they saw it was a person lying on the ground, they couldn’t get off.”Īnother woman, identified only as Charlotte, told Politiken that she saw five people standing on a man and that she tried to pull him up. Eighteen-year-old Sara Kastrup told the Danish newspaper Politiken that she had friends close to the stage who were “standing on one of the poor people. I stayed five songs, and then I pushed my way out.”įor some, there was no way out – or up from the ground. 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. But we needed two.”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. “There were some girls,” he says, “and they were extremely difficult to pull up. 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.Įddie Vedder Shrugs Off Throat Issues as Pearl Jam Return for European Tour Closerīut as Pearl Jam continued to play, Johansen noticed that something was wrong. 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. On Friday, June 30th, at 10:15 P.M., Per Johansen reported for duty.
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