In the summer of 2000, some wag at Mean Fiddler promotions decided it would be a hilarious wheeze to crowbar pop stars Daphne and Celeste into Reading festival’s traditional ‘rock day’ line-up, booking them for a main stage slot on August 27 alongside Slipknot, Rage Against The Machine, Blink-182 and Placebo. Predictably, this did not go down well with the festival audience, and the duo had bottles of piss, shoes, clumps of mud and even a wheelchair thrown at them during their ten minutes onstage. Slipknot vocalist Corey Taylor was in the audience for their show, and he says he made a point of checking in with the shellshocked duo after their performance to console them.
Speaking on comedians Ed Gamble and James Acaster’s Off Menu podcast, Taylor recalls the pair “bawling their eyes out” in their dressing room after their brief mid-afternoon set.
“I was hanging out with some friends of mine and I was like ‘Who are these people?’ and they were trying to explain it to me,” he remembers. “Then dude, it was like the fucking seas opened, and it came out of nowhere. I was like ‘Oh shit!’ But to their credit, man, they stood there and took it. They only did two or three songs but they were like ‘Fuck it we’re gonna go for it!’”
Taylor said he went backstage to offer the pair some words of encouragement after their ordeal.
“I was like ‘Hey, you did something that a lot of people wouldn’t have done… you stayed in there, so hold your head high’,” he recalls. “I don’t know if they fucking cared what I said, but they did it.”
Daphne, aka Karen DiConcetto, actually recalled receiving kind words from Slipknot in a 2017 interview with The Guardian. Stating that there was “something beautiful” about the way in which the crowd were united in their hatred of the duo, she noted: “Backstage, Slipknot and Rage Against the Machine were coming up to us and telling us how hardcore we were – how they wouldn’t have stayed out there. It was definitely the best thing we did, our crowning achievement.”
Corey Taylor recently released a fourth single from his debut solo album, CMFT, which is due for release on October 2. Culture Head follows CMFT Must Be Stopped, Black Eyes Blue and HWY 666.
