Don’t fuckin’ kill yourselves.” The irony of Axl Rose’s plea to the audience at Donington Park on 20 August 1988 was that two people had already been killed: suffocated in mud as the crowd of 107,000 surged helplessly to greet Guns N’ Roses. Though the band’s burgeoning notoriety hardly suffered, culpability for the deaths lay in the negligence of allowing so many to assemble in such primitive conditions. The following year’s event was cancelled and the British rock festival’s age of innocence was over.