Behind the music: A weekly series celebrating music's untold stories, from band-splitting feuds to the greatest performances of all time. Korn were once the most badly behaved band in rock – then tragedy struck. Frontman Jonathan Davis reveals all

This summer saw the anniversary of a Woodstock festival about which no one said a word. It wasn’t the 50th birthday of the happening in 1969 that everyone seems to remember so fondly, but rather one of its two successors, Woodstock ’99, that no one does.

No one, that is, apart from Jonathan Davis, the singer with Californian metal pioneers Korn. The band played a hectic set on the event’s first night, a point before which things onsite truly went south. The front man remembers having a rare old time of it, and also recalls “that everybody else was having a great time, too.”

If the original Woodstock was justly billed as "3 days of peace & music", 30 years on it was a long weekend of anarchy and uproar. From the start, things were messy. The pay-per-view event held in high summer in Rome, New York, lacked adequate toilet facilities from which an audience of 400,000 people might peaceably piss away the bottles of water for which they’d been charged up to nine dollars a pop (this after being searched on entry and having provisions brought from the Outside World confiscated). After three days of wading ankle deep in sewage, come the final night the people had had enough.