Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, episode 072: Forgotten music festival disasters, part 1

Alan Cross Corus Radio

September 1, 2026 8:48 am

Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, episode 072: Forgotten music festival disasters, part 1

Your friends have an idea. Let’s all go to this big music festival! Three days outdoors with lots of music and thousands of like-minded fans.

Great! Sounds like fun! And you have every reason to believe it will be. After all, there will be safety protocols in place, and you and your friends would never do anything stupid. Besides, everyone will be there for a good time. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, actually.

Weeks before the event, you start hearing weird stories about how the festival will be organized and run, but you don’t pay them much attention. As the date gets closer, you start looking at the weather. It doesn’t look promising. At the very least, there will be some discomfort.

When the day arrives, you find that the festival grounds are a mess. Security seems lacking and disinterested. Sanitary conditions are non-existent. There’s rain or blistering sun and no shelter. The acts that you were hoping to see have canceled or just didn’t bother to show up.

And your fellow music fans are not as sensible as you’d hope they’d be. They’re here for the drugs, the quality of which is suspect. Huge volumes of alcohol are being consumed. And then something happens where the herd mentality takes over, and bad things—very bad things—start to happen. You have just found yourself at one of the worst music festivals ever…

We’ve all heard of events like the 1999 edition of Woodstock, the Fyre Festival debacle of 2017, and the Astroworld disaster of 2021. But there are also some festivals that were as bad or worse that we don’t talk about anymore.

This is episode 72 of “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry.” This time, it’s stories of forgotten music festival disasters. And I do not use the word “disaster” lightly.

In addition to the podcasts, you can hear Uncharted on these Corus radio stations (all times local):