Scott’s popularity, boosted by his romance with Kylie Jenner and the constant hyping of his fans – called “Ragers” – through Instagram means he performs exclusively in large-scale stadiums now. It’s a small venue that holds around 2000 people, a very different experience to seeing a headliner perform after a whole day spent in the heat of a music festival in a stadium alongside 50,000 rabid fans. But if you wanted to escape, the exit to Sydney’s Metro Theatre was just a few steps away. Fans reacted in kind, and the crowd crush there was real. It was a head-rush of a show, one of the more aggressive performances I’ve seen.
ASTROWORLD 2001 FULL
His notorious stage anger was on full display that September night: he attacked a security guard, pushed fans off his stage, then crowd-surfed across the venue to perform ‘Pick up the Phone’ in the middle of the crowd. I’ve also seen Scott, an incendiary performer who encourages fans to “rage” with him, at a 2016 concert in Sydney. The stranger who put his arm around my shoulder and sang ‘Vicarious’ with me at Tool’s Spark Arena show, pre-pandemic, is proof of that. You’ll never find happier people than a group of heavy metal fans at a rock show. But I’ve also had some of the best times of my life in them. I’ve seen a tonne of bad behaviour too, including a full-on fist fight at a Schoolboy Q show. I’ve been in plenty of rowdy mosh pits before, and once broke my nose at the front of a Shihad show.
Travis Scott performs in Houston at Astroworld. It recalls images of Woodstock ‘99, a now-infamous event headlined by Limp Bizkit that ended ablaze, in a riot, and was recently turned into an HBO documentary. Other videos show fans trying and failing to stop the show, warning of injuries and fatalities. “Never have I seen people disregarding unconscious bodies to fend for themselves,” someone else told the Times.įootage shows punters jumping on ambulances forcing their way through crowds to get to the injured. “Person after person was sucked down … I saw terror in every eye that I met,” wrote one concert-goer on Instagram. One compared the crowd crush to a sinkhole. The descriptions of what happened in the crowd that night are truly horrifying.
“Imagine listening to Travis Scott and people screaming for their lives at the same time,” another told CNN. “It was crazier than in 2019,” one punter told the New York Times. So, with all those precautions, how could it become so hellish? According to Astroworld festival-goers, the energy at this event, the second of Scott’s festivals after its debut two years ago, was different to previous ones. For many music fans, like me, it’s as close as we get to heaven.
‘No way out’: A sudden life-and-death struggle was the first headline I came across, and they got worse as updates flowed throughout the day. I didn’t know how bad things had become until I woke up the following morning and read the shocking stories. Something just felt wrong, so I turned it off early. When cameras cut to the crowd, heaving moshpits could be seen surging across the venue. I watched that stream with a horrible feeling in my stomach. Houston Police’s homicide division is involved. That didn’t stop a tragedy from unfolding: during Scott’s Friday night set, livestreamed through Apple Music around the world – including being beamed into my lounge in Te Atatū, Tāmaki Makaurau, on Saturday afternoon – eight people died during a crowd crush, including a 14 and a 17-year-old, and hundreds more were injured. By all accounts, every possible measure had been taken to ensure a safe event was under way at Travis Scott’s music festival Astroworld, the headlining rapper’s hometown event held in Houston over the weekend. Travis Scott’s Houston festival tragedy is a warning to concert promoters the world over.
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