by Ian Carroll
“One moment from Download 2005 that will stick with me forever is a certain point during Slipknot's performance of ‘Duality’. The vibe around the crowd was amazing. It felt like one massive unit, all one and the same, here for the same reason... let’s do this! I remember being down the front, probably jumping about like a loon in one of the pits and the last big chorus hit and throughout the song the crowd had been singing along to every word but when this chorus hit, it felt like something special happened. The clouds opened up and it started pouring down with rain onto us as everyone sang... well, roared!! In unity to the last chorus. We all came together and it was amazing. The only word I can use is epic! A truly ‘goosebumpy’ moment.
That is just one moment for me, but there are many, many other things from all the Download Festivals over the years that will stick with me, long live Download!”
Charley Olsen (Brighton)
“I think it was Download ‘05, we were all back at the campsite having a drink
and getting ready to go back to the arena when one of my mates Sam Stocker
was having a bit of a play fight with a girl. They both fell down and one of them groaned, they both got up and we noticed that stocker had a fork impaling his hand and it had noodles from a crushed pot noodle hanging from inside his hand. He quickly said "to the medical tent" and ran off to have it removed.” Andre Jenkin (St Austell, Cornwall)
“So I went camping. For 3 days. At Castle Donington rock festival. Age 33. I had been going to the Reading festival just for the day since 1999. I had always cringed at the thought of camping. Especially when you walked through the campsite and saw all the piles of rubbish and all the bewildered faces staring at you from graffiti covered tents. You can’t wash, the toilets are disgusting and the whole place resembles a refugee camp. “I’m never doing that” thought I.
I went to the Castle Donington rock festival to see the really heavy bands (Reading is more trendy/ flavour of the month band orientated). It was great but still the idea of camping filled me with the horrors.
Then I saw the Donington line-up! Black Sabbath with Ozzy, Motorhead, Slayer, Slipknot and hordes of other bands that would have a pussy like you wetting the bed. THIS was the festival to bite the bullet and break my festival camping duck at. Also, it was in June so that considerably reduced my permission problem. Gerard didn’t want to go (as he now hates METAL) and Ed would die in a tent due to multiple hygiene issues. So it was me and Bruce that booked up to join the 45,000 other campers for the 3- day festival. I wondered what I’d done. I was actually doing this, the toilets, the discomfort THE METAL!
I have got James, the bloke I sit next to at work into metal and the pre-Donington excitement was contagious enough for him to book up to join us for the Saturday + camping.
Louise packed my stuff and with PLENTY of trepidation I waited for Bruce to pick me up early Friday morning. This was a bone of contention because when we attended the festival last year we had to queue for an hour to get in and (wait for it) 4 f**king hours to get out of the car park!! My Idea was to go up Thursday night and also stay Sunday night. But it was beer festival week and Bruce works there, so going Thursday night was a no go and the little fartknocker hadn’t booked Monday off so we had travel back Sunday night!?!
(In hindsight this turned out to be a godsend).
The first band I wanted to see (Flogging Molly) were due on stage at 1pm and I didn’t think we would get there and pitch the tent in time to see them.
Bruce picked me up and things got off to a bad start as the little arsehole was hung-over and irritable. I pointed out that he wasn’t listening to a word I was saying and he started shouting “Do you want us to crash?” at me!
We got up there in good time and to my surprise there was no queue to get in (I began to think it had been cancelled but it was just that the Friday was least attended, the next day Black Sabbath played and the crowd doubled). We parked easily and got our shit out of the car. We had plenty of gear, especially Bruce who even had a cool bag with butter, bread and cold cuts of meat in it which he made sandwiches each day. We hauled ass to the campsite, the first two were full and we were directed to the yellow campsite that boasted showers. We pitched the tent close to the aforementioned showers in a tiny space next to a youth with an acoustic guitar. I pleaded with Bruce to put it somewhere else as we would want to smash that guitar before the weekend was over but he was already feeding the fishing rod like supports through the tent canvas.
We queued to get in and it occurred to me that most people were fat, ugly and wearing black. The festival site is located at the end of the runway of East Midlands airport. The planes roar over so low that you can see the passengers looking at all the Metal kids giving them the finger and throwing beer cans at them.
We saw Flogging Molly on time, who were great. The rest of the day was spent watching other bands you’ve never heard of. At one point I returned to the tent alone. Even though I was having a fantastic time, I felt really homesick. I got into my sleeping bag and cuddled up to my rucksack like a bitch as thousands of teenagers talked shit though clouds of weed in the tents around me.
After a hard day’s rocking we returned to the tent ready to sleep like logs. Unfortunately, it was like trying to sleep through a riot. Out of their heads and away from mummy 44,998 teenagers were now screaming their heads off. Sleep was impossible. I eventually dropped off awaking at 5:30am to total silence. I seized my chance and headed over to the shower block for a lovely hot shower. I didn’t wake Bruce because he’d get the arse ache . The showers were empty! I needed a shit and played portaloo Russian roulette, eventually finding one that didn’t have vomit and brownjack splattered all over it. I had been building up my thigh muscles so that I didn’t have to sit on the seat. As I tucked into a breakfast baguette I enjoyed the sight of the first plane booming into land waking all these bastards up! I noticed that people were drinking and smoking weed at 7am!?
By the time Bruce surfaced and went over for a shower there was a massive queue AND the hot water was off! He didn’t bother to wash and we went to the campsite entrance and waited for James to arrive.
He was difficult to spot as he was wearing black and is ugly. He has a conifer hairstyle and this was the only place on earth that it wouldn’t look out of place. He was horrified by the size of our tent (a 2 man tent masquerading as a 3-man tent!) we went into the arena and as I’m an only child I was in charge of picking which bands we saw.
As the first band were all female 21 year olds from Sweden I didn’t hear a peep of dissent as we raced toward the Napster tent. Another day of seeing multiple bands ensued but there was a lot more drinking as James was with us. We took him to the Guinness tent where all the barmaids were stunning. “I don’t even like Guinness” said the great mullet gulping it down like he was drinking piss. He liked the barmaids. You could not take booze into the arena so James and I kept running back to our tent, he to take a massive hit from his vodka and lemonade and me from my bottle of bourbon and coke. This resulted in our attendance in the Anthrax mosh pit. From the chaos of the pit you can’t actually see the band!?
We were all separated during Sabbath and at the end I retired to the tent absolutely knackered. I lay there waiting for the others, my back hurt, my legs hurt and my feet were killing me. Eventually James arrived. “You took your time?” I asked
“I was watching the pole dancers in the Napster tent” Replied Chewbacca grinning
“WELL DON’T JUST STAND THERE, PASS MY SHOES!” shouted I heroically summoning the last of my strength.
“It’s finished” he said disappearing into his sleeping bag.
Bruce entered the tent soon after
“You never guess what I’ve just seen in the Napster tent?”
“F**k you!”
We had another sleepless night. I awoke again at 5:30am and I took advantage of the empty showers and shithouse. I looked at the two wretches in my tent. Bruce was a little irritable bundle that farted in his
sleep and James looked like a plastic Christmas tree when it’s in its box. They surfaced in time to see the shower queue snaking through the campsite.
We said farewell to James and had another day of ROCK. 5 hours later I turned on my phone to see two texts from James:
‘Legg, I can’t find my car, are you still there?”
Then
“I found it, 5 hours later!”
Apparently they had put him in the day parking instead of the camping car park and he had been going round in circles in the wrong car park.
We had a plan to leave just before Motorhead finished so that we could get out a good hour before the band on the main stage finished. This we achieved and got out of the car park no problem.
In conclusion I loved going for 3 days but the camping was pretty hardcore. Funnily enough I have realised that I quite like camping but not surrounded by drunken teenagers! I would like to go on a camping holiday with Louise but you wouldn’t get the Metal bands in the new Forest!!”
Simon Legg (Grays, Essex)
2006
Tool, Metallica & Guns N’ Roses
This year saw the return of two metal titans to Donington; Download regulars Metallica were back for their 3rd headline show on the Saturday and returning for the first time since their show in 1988, eighteen years before, Guns N' Roses finished the festival off on the Sunday evening.
Friday night was headlined by Tool, coming back to Donington at an elevated level after their appearance at Ozzfest four years before.
The Metallica set on the Saturday featured the 'Master Of Puppets' album, played track by track plus some classic other tracks played afterwards; for the encore, members of other bands including Trivium came up and sang along with Metallica on some cover versions.
The most controversial set of the weekend was the GNR headline slot on Sunday night, with Axl spending more time off the stage than he did on, at some points. Guns were a shadow of their former selves and even the special guest appearances of Izzy Stradlin and Sebastian Bach (ex- Skid Row), did little to alleviate the problems or raise the crowd’s spirits. Axl, early in the set, slipped on the stage and went off for ages whilst his band performed jams until he came back on, seemingly more relaxed and went through to complete the rest of the set without a hitch; after the set, the weekend was marred by the riots in the campsite, a once off occurrence in the history of festivals at Donington.
Elsewhere on the mainstage were a host of 'usual suspects', popular Download regulars in the shape of Bullet For My Valentine (gradually climbing the bill), Trivium (also scaling the bill to an equal 3rd place slot on the Saturday), Korn (again in the 'special guest' slot) and Funeral For A Friend playing just before GNR. The Korn set was very different to usual as Jonathan Davis had been rushed to hospital, so they played with special guests on vocal duties; vocals were carried out by Matt Heafy from Trivium, Benji from Skindred, M Shadows from Avenged Sevenfold and Jesse Hasek from the virtually unknown Ten Years.
Another extremely controversial choice was when The Prodigy were chosen to headline the 2nd stage.
'Dance Music' at Donington? Would it work? Would people attend the stage? The answer to all these questions was answered in the positive, with a huge crowd, a 'banging' set and the most popular show in the tent for the whole weekend.
Sick Of It All had the task of playing against the GNR slot on the 3rd stage and Lordi made a triumphant return to Download playing before SOIA, after having won the Eurovision song contest the same year with 'Hard Rock Hallelujah' and the tent was packed.
The Snickers Bowl, featuring skateboarders and performances from smaller artists such as Betty Curse and Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly; the Bowl was very popular all weekend, as were the free Snickers bars, which were in abundance.
Another great weekend and the festival would return for its 5th time the following year.
“We obviously headlined Download in ’06, which was probably the best gig that we have ever done on the Donington ground and I would say that it even eclipsed the ’95 appearance.
We played ‘Master Of Puppets’ in its entirety and I just remember all other bands were crowded around the stage; I remember watching Phil Anselmo over at the side, banging along to every not of ‘Master Of Puppets’.
We played a ‘blinder’ that day, as the English say and we played a new song, I believe at the time it was called ‘The New Song’; I think the intro and the middle part morphed and ended up in the song ‘The End of the Line’ which is on ‘Death Magnetic’.
We played ‘Puppets’ in it’s entirety and then a Misfits cover for the first encore and a bunch of the other bands came out and sang with us; that was definitely the best Donington appearance, it was a good one.”
Lars Ulrich (Metallica – Drums)
“The last time we played was in support to Guns N’ Roses, just before they made their return and it was one of those things that you wish you could scrub from your memory really. I would have rather been watching Sick Of It All.”
Matt Davies (Funeral For A Friend – Vocals)
“The most difficult show was the one where we were main support for Guns N’ Roses. It was still enjoyable, but there were a lot of people who were just there just to see Guns N’ Roses, who were probably immensely disappointed, as I was. I had set myself up for disappointment to be honest as I couldn’t really see it being that great and it wasn’t. I wish that they would just leave GNR alone, unless Slash would come back, but then it would still just be Axl, Slash & Friends.”
Ryan Richards (Funeral For A Friend – Drums)
“The first time we played was 2006 and we were all really excited to play the festival especially because of the history of it because it was always Monsters Of Rock when I was growing up, but it’s still the same festival, with a great variety of rock bands.
What happened on that trip was that we had a big falling out with our drummer; he had decided that he couldn’t come on the trip due to his own reasons and that was 2 hours before we got on the plane. So we were at the airport trying to figure out what we were going to do. We didn’t have many dates on that tour, we had to cancel a bunch of them in the end, but that’s a long story to get to that; but there weren’t many festivals and one of the biggest ones was Donington and we really wanted to get there and do it. We felt that playing at Donington was very important and we also wanted to see some of the bands that were going to be there; it was just a great opportunity and it’s beautiful there too.
We decided that if the worse came to the worst and our drummer decided not to fly out, we would rehearse with our drum tech because he knew all the songs and had been around with us for so long. We arrived at Donington the day before and immediately started rehearsing and he learned all the songs or whatever he could at the time to fit in to his mind. We had about 5 hours to get all this shit together and he was a really great drummer. His name was MP (Michael Petrak) and he got together whatever he could to pull it off, if our drummer Josh wasn’t able to fly out and he didn’t.
We had a great slot at around three or four in the afternoon, which is kinda prefect.
It came down to showtime and we were all scared shitless, but we got up there and in front of that huge crowd we pulled it off. I guess that the positive part of the whole story was that in front of that crowd we realised that we were going to be ok; things got shittier as that tour went on, but that was a big part of being able to turn around a say ‘we did that show, in front of that huge crowd and it worked out’. We were still able to do it even though all that bullshit was going on, especially for Claudio and I at that point as we were given a good example of how it would be to go on if shit really hit the fan, which it did.