Guns N' Roses legend: my nightmares about the day two fans died at Donington.

Aug 8 2010 by Paul Cole, Sunday Mercury

AMERICAN rock legend Steven Adler has revealed how the death of two fans at a Midlands festival has haunted him “like a waking nightmare” for more than 20 years.

The 45 year-old drummer was playing with Guns N’ Roses at Donington Park when two young men were crushed at the front of the 107,000-strong crowd.

The band had flown in for the August 20, 1988 gig on Concorde, only to find the rain-soaked site in Leicestershire a sea of mud, making conditions treacherous underfoot.

“In the middle of the afternoon we hit the stage,” recalls Adler in his new biography, My Appetite For Destruction.

“It was a madhouse. Over 100,000 kids were cramming against the front.

“The racetrack was selling the big 32oz beers. The kids were drinking, and they weren’t about to go through the whole crowd just to urinate in a stall, so they used the bottles.

“We saw what looked like a swarm of giant locusts flying through the air. They were actually hundreds of these plastic bottles of urine soaring over the crowd.

“People were getting hit in the head and splattered with pee. But it wasn’t going to change anything. We’d been spit on, and had bottles of booze and beer thrown at us before.”

Even so, Adler admits that he was taken aback by the size of the crowd, even though bigger acts on the bill included Iron Maiden, Kiss and David Lee Roth.

“I was surprised to see so many Guns N’ Roses banners waving in the crowd,” says Adler.

“By the time we went in there must have been 120,000 people screaming and jumping up and down.