From Donington To Download

by Ian Carroll

  Brock Lindow (36 Crazyfists – Vocals)

  “In 2004 it was totally different to 1992, as I hadn’t really kept an eye on it at the end of the 90’s or into the early 00’s, because I was doing the solo stuff and I was spending a lot of time in America.

  To get on the bill, I really didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t even know what it was like and how the whole thing was. I remember that I was on really, really early and I was really worried that there would be nobody in the tent to see the show, because it wasn’t The Almighty but Ricky Warwick.

  But it was packed and it was great. I think I went on around 12:30pm and did my stuff, which is not metal, my stuff is like Americana country music and I was standing there playing it thinking ‘how is this going to go over?’

  I had a full band with me, which is great, but I went down really, really well. Everyone was pleased that I didn’t play one Almighty song, which in hindsight is a silly thing and maybe I should have thrown one in, but I got a fantastic reaction.

  So, both my performances at Donington were totally different things, but both good and satisfying in their own ways; but obviously the first time round with The Almighty was huge and it was our little band that we had started and we were there, playing Donington and it was so unbelieveable as we had dreamed about it as kids.”

  Ricky Warwick (Ricky Warwick – Vocals/Guitar)

  “Well I can remember quite a few from Download....Probably the most major is when our bus broke down for Download of 2004 and we had to miss our slot for mainstage...but Jason Gong of the band Drowning Pool invited us up during their set and we all played the song "Halo" together....and not to mention all the drunken madness we had that time with Dimebag Darrel, Kronos, the Arch Enemy guys, and Slipknot.....”

  Tim King (Soil – Bass)

  “I previously worked for my friends band Akercocke in ’04 and that was a really big event for me. The last five years I had been blagging my way in with other bands, ‘teching’ or driving.”

  Luca Grandi (Ted Maul – Guitar)

  “The first time that I went to Donington was in 2004 when I played with Akercocke. It went really well and I had never played anything nearly as big and it was large tent and it was full as far back as I could see.

  The first quarter of an hour before the show, when you are backstage with the equipment just looking at the crowd, because normally I’m used to playing quite small venues, so that was quite nerve wracking.

  Then there was one particular bit of a song where I was quite shaky on, but when that was out of the way I really enjoyed myself and it was fantastic.”

  Casino Brown (Akercocke - Keyboards)

  “We actually filmed most of Silvertide’ s EPK DVD at Donington/Download Festival which was awesome because I was so drunk that I didn't remember having a good time until I watched the footage.

  What I found to be very hip about the Donington/Download Festival were the backstage arrangements. All of the dressing rooms were in small groups facing a common area which was great because I got to hang out with Nikki Sixx and many other musicians for hours before and after Silvertide played.

  The concert setting itself feels more like a community of people getting together to have an incredible time regardless of who their favorite band is and the crowd at Donington is the best group of people I've ever hung out and got drunk with.

  To this day I still keep in contact with friends that I met in the audience, and backstage. I can't say enough about how much of a great time that I had at Download and my only regret is that I haven't invented a way to teleport that crowd to my side of the pond.”

  Walt Lafty (Silvertide – Vocals)

  "Well it was the summer of 2004 - I think! - And a few planes, trains, and SPLITTER VANS later, Silvertide arrived in Donington.

  It was hot, there were beautiful girls for miles, and enough rockers crammed into a small outdoor backstage area to raise suspicion... yep it was the Download festival!

  I remember that time specifically because we were filming our EPK, and had cameras on us at all times - lucky for them - there was plenty to shoot :) We shared a dressing room with The Brides of Destruction, which was great and really important, actually. Not knowing it then, I guess we planted some pretty good seeds with Nikki, because a year later we were opening for the reunited Motley Crue.

  I know we played under some sort of tent packed with wild and sweaty Rock N' Roll fans - who gave us more love than we ever could have hoped for. It was magic. Filled with topless chicks and fist pounding dudes, that place was fucking lit up. It sounded great, felt electric, and reeked of beer... the way any good rock show should!!!"

  Nick Perri (Silvertide – Guitar)

  “Donington has been a very good festival to us. Our first time at Download was really cool, we opened up the mainstage on the famous year that Metallica kind of played, but didn’t!

  So we were in the backstage area with Metallica and all these other big bands.

  We had a ‘mega mega’ response, we had a huge turn out of 30-40,000 at 11 o’clock in the morning and it was great because that same week we hit the Top 40 with our single ‘The River’ and our new album came out, it was a culmination of that whole era of Breed 77.

  There is a huge sense of occasion with Donington always; it is not so much of a festival but an event. It’s steeped in history we always think of Monsters Of Rock and I never call it Download, it’s Donington! You feel that you are walking in the footsteps of so many famous acts before you. When you do it you have to rise to the occasion and you’ve got to give more than you usually do.

  We managed to get extremely drunk, by 7pm we had been drinking for 7 hours straight and according to police reports everything was kosher and above board.”

  Paul Isola (Breed 77 – Vocals)

  “I played at Donington Festival in 2004 on the Snickers stage with my old

  band, Million Dead. My highlight of the day was being able to walk

  onstage and announce "It's not Download, it's Donington, and it's not

  Snickers, it's Marathon!"

  I remember being a kid and staying up late to listen to Iron Maiden at Donington in 1993 (? I think), so it was an honour to play there.

  We met Iggy Pop backstage, flanked by a phalanx of bouncers, apparently because of his ongoing beef with the Hells Angels.

  True metal paradise!”

  Frank Turner (Million Dead – Vocals)

  “Being in a band with two ex-metal heads and one Iron Maiden fan, playing Download festival was a pretty big deal to the rest of my band. Playing in front of more than fifty people was a good show for me, so the prospect of playing in front of a few thousand was fairly daunting.

  The standard joke of the day was this was Donington, not Download, and one of the stages was the Marathon bowl, not the Snickers bowl. Clearly, we were a hilarious band.

  This was my first experience of playing a large festival and the concept of rotating drum risers... "you mean, I get to set up my kit as I want it and you roll it out on stage and it's ready for me to play?.....oh yes...."

  For a band that was used to playing punk shows and the hasty change over, this was pure luxury. The idea, too, that Jerome, the man who deals with my Sabian endorsement, was around and I was able to borrow a ride cymbal off him to temporarily replace my broken one (I believe I used Arch Enemy's ride) was just awesome... it was these little things that made the day special and would allow you to imagine, just for a short while, that your band was bigger

  than it actually was.

  I remember the backstage area being fantastic (and far superior, as I would find out, to any other festivals), with arcade games I could not be bothered to play, a hair dresser for the rock stars and a masseuse (whom I believe Frank, my singer, utilised). There was also the dichotomy of fridges filled with free Carling. It was lots of free beer, but the worst beer ever made by man. Ever. (As a side not, anyone who actually orders Carling at a bar out of preference

  dese
rves to have their tongue cut out).

  The show went very well, the tent was almost packed (we were playing on the second stage at around 3.pm), although I recall checking out reviews on the Radio 1 website where one festival goer had described the tent as empty and us as rubbish, and as I read more and more of his "review" I realised he had mistaken us and the previous band (who's time slot we had swapped with) and was calling us shit because of their performance and them great for ours. It even talked about their female bassist. We had the girl, they were all guys. Nice to know that any one reading that about us would possibly dismiss us

  from then on because they'd heard we were shit...great.

  The rest of the day was spent drinking with Yourcodenameis: Milo: Milo, praising their tour manager, Stan, for his fantastic handlebar moustache, and laughing at the guys who filmed our video blagging their way past security because they'd "just go in for five minutes to say goodbye to Million Dead and be straight back out" then raped the buffet and walked back out past the distinctly unimpressed security guard with the biggest sandwiches I'd ever seen.

  I completely failed to go watch any other bands because, ironically, I hate festivals...great to play but the worst way of watching a band ever. Instead I'm afraid I was very very drunk, and only remember the journey home taking twice as long because our driver was incredibly stoned and was driving at half the speed he usually does.

  Safety first.”

  Ben Dawson (Million Dead – Drums)

  “I remember seeing Cradle Of Filth playing in the day, when I didn’t think Goths came out, wearing PVC and sweating profusely.”

  Sean Smith (The Blackout – Vocals)

  “We played Download in 2004. Our first album was just out and we were gorging ourselves off the excitement and anticipation that comes with doing your first festival circuit ever.

  We were due to play the Snickers stage on day 2 of the festival and decided to get there a day early to soak up the atmosphere and hopefully, some of Downloads renowned (and rumoured free) hospitality and so that's what we did.

  We all knew opening a stage on day 2 is a bit of a risky business regardless of what state you might be in. Will the crowd turn out? Will all the gear be working having been thrown about a Splitter van for the last month? Will Paul actually be sick like he claims he will? And will my arse hold out without lapsing into a whiskey induced prolapse before the end of the gig? These were just a few of the things flashing around my mind.

  Well they did, it was, Paul didn't and I nearly and it was a great sound and a great show which ended with Paul destroying his flying V. There's a picture somewhere on the net with some lucky guy holding the remains.

  It was also incredibly hot that year. Adrian, our tech, sported a skin head which was so burnt by the time Soul Fly had come on the top of his head was actually supplying 30% of the over all heat being radiated from the crowd and putting aeroplanes off course. He didn't mind though as he dowsed the pain with a bottle of Buckfast. Devon’s finest.

  This was also the year that Metallica played and Lars didn't make it. There were all sorts of rumours floating about as to what had happened to him. He was ill. Customs had got him. Adrian’s head heat had forced his plane to land at Glasgow Airport. What ever the reason, we didn't take notice cause we got to sit backstage and watch the stream of other bands drummers marching in and out of the Metallica trailer. It was awesome. In fact I'm surprised there wasn't a massive battle of stick wielding maniacs all vying to play ‘Enter Sandman’. Good on them I say. Christ! Its bad enough dealing with one of the fuckers!”

  Ian Fairclough (Terra Diablo – Vocals)

  “I went to Download with a few of my mates in 2004 and Metallica were playing, but Ulrich was sick or coked up or whatever, so he wasn’t there. So they had Joey from Slipknot played a couple tracks and the guy from Slayer, Dave Lombardo, played a couple tracks and that was really cool.”

  Logan (Sons Of Albion – Vocals)

  “For three exhilarating and ground-breaking years between 2004 and 2006, my team and I were contracted to help create and raise a real monster – the online profile and community of Download Festival, the biggest and baddest that had ever rocked the Earth. It was an adventure of epic proportions, packed with stories to tell our grandchildren and lessons we will take to our graves. The rest is history. This is our story...

  Whilst most festival promoters would be satisfied with simply having the best rock festival in the UK, Stuart Galbraith and his team wanted their new creation - Download - to go one step beyond that and break new boundaries in digital innovation, a tall order and one that we at Virtual Festivals naturally found tremendously alluring.

  By 2003, 99% of festival and concert tickets were being sold online, yet the old-school-dominated live industry was still painfully backward in embracing the digital age. At last here was a major new event we could really work with. We first hit it off with the organisers during the debut event, as they witnessed us beavering away, uploading our online coverage from a little backstage portakabin into the small hours, while our peers were propping up the VIP bar. It was a testament to how seriously they took their online aspirations when they invited us, along with just one other publication (a national newspaper) in to photograph the most anticipated event of that first festival - Metallica's ‘secret’ appearance in the Snickers Tent.

  Then, six months later, the call came in from Clear Channel (now Live Nation) asking for our help in an official capacity to create a powerful online profile and community around the festival. With market-leading case studies under our belts for both Virtual Festivals and, more recently, Glastonbury Festival, this was something we knew we could deliver and we jumped at the opportunity. It was our most exciting challenge yet, as well as our toughest, as Download did already have an online community, albeit one that was very negatively skewed against the event (and its organisers) doing more harm than good, initially.

  This was common with official festival forums (which is why few events dared have them back then); we're talking long before social networking was a mainstream way of life and these things do need a lot of time and energy invested, especially at the start, in order to bear fruit. I told Clear Channel to give us two weeks to sort it out.

  The first step in building rapport digitally (just like in real life) is always to develop a close dialogue with your subjects, in their own language. As with all major festivals, there was a huge culture-shaped fence dividing the organisers (professional company executives required primarily to make the event safe, efficient and profitable) and their customers (who had very different things on their minds). As I've come to see, one of the most thankless things about being a festival organiser is that, the better you do your job, the less it is noticed - the fans will only pick up on your failings.

  So it would be no good the organisers trying to make friends online with the fans, any more than it would be for your mum to start messaging your mates on Facebook today. What we needed was a third party who could understand and interface between both sides of the fence. Virtual Festivals was an inspired choice for the 'brain' of this character (If I say so myself) but as John Probyn himself recently stated, we did look like web geeks back then.

  We needed a Monster Of Rock, and it turned out that he already existed as a piece of conceptual artwork within the festival’s assets. As soon as I saw him, I knew it was time to let the Download Dog out of his kennel.

  With his razor-sharp fangs, spike-studded collar, feral glare and pink coat, this guy immediately struck me as the perfect embodiment of rock - wild, aggressive, outspoken, a bit disturbing, funny and camp. Logging-on to the message boards as this character had a similar effect on to putting on The Mask in the Jim Carrie film. The Dog's larger-than-life personality exploded from the keyboard, dousing the forums with an infectious enthusiasm loaded with irreverent attitude (bite), charisma and humour. Anyone who tried to spread negative feeling on the boards got a taste of the Dog's fangs, and boy were they sharp! The f
ans loved it and in no time, the community was buzzing and the Dog started picking up a loyal, adoring following of his own. Believe me; you wanted to be on this fella's team.

  It wasn't just about the banter though - far from it - The Dog had a very important educational role to play too. He took great time to respond to questions and constructive criticism. Vast swathes of Download's audience were won over, for instance, when it was explained to them that the organisers were not withholding artist announcements just to be annoying - there were sensitive contractual issues over which they had no control - and that artist billing orders were most often governed by the evil booking agents, not the promoters. At the end of the day, Download's marauding fans were not a bad bunch. All they'd wanted was for their views to be officially acknowledged. By doing so, replying wherever possible and making them feel like they had some input into the event, these rock kids were putty in the Dog's paws.

  We had so much fun with that guy, it was addictive - something we'd look forward to doing each day. As well as responding to posts, the Dog took a proactive role in using his new, fast growing, fanbase to generate newsworthy content. We ran polls and solved some of life's biggest questions such as "What's the greatest guitar solo ever?", "What would the most awesome supergroup of all time consist of?" and, er, "Which celebrity would you most likely to share your tent with?” We even uncovered the cover version that Download fans most wanted Metallica to perform. Then we contacted their management and the band actually played it during their set at Download. Co-incidence or not, The Dog was never more respected. If you're curious, the answers to all these riddles can all still be found in the Download forum archives now.

  Aside from fun on the forums we also found the time to populate the content on the official website, establishing a far more compelling, engaging and edgy tone than the characterless 'press release' style of the festival's rivals. We created a page for every act on the line-up, uncovering bizarre and interesting facts about them and involved the artists in the process. I remember sitting on the top deck of the 93 bus once, surrounded by teenagers in Slipknot t-shirts, beaming inside as, unbeknownst to them, I chatted on my mobile to percussionist Chris Fehn (nose) from the band about their upcoming Download appearance.