WE ARE ALL PIGS. Woodstock 1994 – Nine Inch Nails Go Overground

New post on my blog, extracted from my book, Into The Never



Nine Inch Nails’ played as part of the 1991 Lollapalooza tour [July-August], from New Orleans to Orlando, as with their legendary Woodstock performance in 1994, it proved to be a watershed series of events. Emerging on-stage covered in their [then] trademark corn-starch, other groups appeared too clean and too keen to entertain, NIN’s appearance alone placed them as a band apart, bringing Reznor’s private war and their internal conflicts to the stage. ICE-T played guitar with them for Head Like A Hole and at the end the band trashed all of their equipment. Their performance massively increased their profile amongst major record labels and audiences.

Coming-off the road in September 1991, Reznor said the band were “imploding”. The theatrical element of the band members’ on-stage ‘violence’ of bumping, tackling and body-slamming into one another had become increasingly real and “negative”, where blood was spilt and equipment trashed, a mode of behaviour more or less replicated by the audience Reznor had goaded into the same frenzied state. It was the purposeful aggression which added pressure to the standard tour routine of shows, generic hotel rooms, waking up just to travel all day and do the same thing the next night. Nine Inch Nails did not tour again until March, 1994.


https://adamsteiner.uk/2020/08/14/we...go-overground/