by Ian Carroll
Toby Jepson (Fastway - Vocals)
“Cut to 11 years later. We are back at Donington, but this time for the Download Festival; the successor to the Monsters of Rock Festival, whilst still feeling very honoured to be asked to be there, seems a much less cosy affair in the backstage area. Possibly down to the fact that there are an insane amount of bands playing.
This is also a much more commercial festival.
None of the bands backstage seem to want to see any of the bands onstage. Everyone seems more concerned with networking.
On the plus side this is a much more musically diverse festival.
Rock and metal music has splintered into thousands of variations and its all here.
The show went very well. It amazed me that rock and metal music still has such a fervent following in the UK. For some reason metal music seems to be a dirty word amongst the UK media but Download proves that people can think for themselves."
Gregor Mackintosh (Paradise Lost - Guitar)
“What do you do but say, fucking yes, when asked if you want to be a part of one of Rock / Metals biggest festivals? Download! Or to us “old moshers” as I’m sometimes referred to, Monsters Of Rock, Castle Donington.
It is where I cut my teeth as a festival goer, seeing the likes of Metallica, Kiss, Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, Paradise Lost and AC/DC over a number of years.
It is the epitome of what a rock festival should be, bringing the best of all genres together in one giant cauldron. It is the Promised Land but without the virgins.
We, as My Dying Bride, felt honoured to have been asked to play The Dimebag stage. We felt this especially so as this was the first time for us to perform there and also as the stage we would be on was named in the memory of one of metals greats. So again just a truly humbling experience getting to play in England at our biggest metal festival. Something I will never forget”.
Andrew Craighan (My Dying Bride – Guitarist)
“It was our first time; I think we were one of the only bands that camped, that was the way that we wanted to do it and to be honest I had never been there before.
We went up in two parties and one van broke down. So we got there that night had a few beers, set the tents up and then went to sleep, to be woken up at 11am the next day by some rock ‘n’ roll music; which was a good start to the day in my eyes.
We grabbed a couple of cans and went around the arenas. It was awesome the bill, with the big guns like Maiden and Motley Crue.”
Tom Lacey (The Ghost Of A Thousand – Vocals)
“We got about 15 minutes outside of Brighton before the car broke down. We had all the camping gear in the car, so we got it all out and sat on the camping chairs on the hard shoulder waiting for the recovery truck to arrive. They then towed us all the way to North London, which took about 3 hours because they had go at 60 mph or even less than that; we stayed in North London that night.
The next day we woke up, pushed the car for a mile and a half to the garage and then spent the day in London milling around waiting for the car to be fixed.
We made it to Donington in the afternoon on the Friday, we got there just as Velvet Revolver were playing, I think; I arrived to the sounds of Slash ‘ripping a solo’, which was awesome.
It was our first big festival and it’s such a big name in rock and metal these days that it was a real honour to play it. I went and checked Motley Crue play the 2nd stage instead of the mainstage, Biffy Clyro and Suicidal Tendencies and basically had just an awesome weekend. I went on the fairground rides, just trying to experience the whole thing and it was a good time.
I really enjoyed the gig, we were really ‘buzzed up’ and then after the gig, we spent the rest of the day having a party and had a really good weekend.
It was definitely one of the gigs that sticks in my mind as it started a lot of things really. That summer for us, we played Download and then the touring never stopped. So I look at it as the springboard that propelled us to where we’ve got to now; so it meant a lot and that was where it all started.”
Andy Blyth (The Ghost Of A Thousand – Guitar)
“It was legitimately a dream come true for me and Army Of Freshmen.
I remember being a kid in America and watching MTV and every summer for one weekend they would do a live broadcast from a place called Castle Donington. As a kid I was led to believe that there was a castle there and it was like a magical place where King Arthur lives and now he has heavy metal concerts there. Being a little kid in New Jersey, your perception of England is pretty skewed and you think that people are still in ‘knight uniforms’!
You’d see those pompous MTV DJs, back when they had perms saying ‘it’s the greatest rock concert of all time’ and as a little kid I just wanted to be part of that world, half because I thought there were knights there and half because it was a big rock show. It was just such as mystical thing, but as I grew up I got the rock magazines and the heavy metal magazines in the States and they would have reviews of the Donington festivals and it was just such a big deal.
It was something that I never thought Army Of Freshmen would ever get the chance to play because we are predominantly a ‘pop band’ / ‘pop punk’ band and Donington and Download were still a metal festival.
Then we became friends with Bowling For Soup and they told us that they were getting ready to play the Download Festival which used to be Castle Donington and I was like ‘Oh my god, that festival is still happening, but it’s under a different name’. So they told me all about it and described it as the most incredible experience and the backstage is full of big time rock stars, everyone is mingling and the crowd are just psychotically amazing. I thought we would never have the chance, because Bowling For Soup had success in England and the metal crowd really accepts Bowling For Soup for some reason because they take the piss out of it and they don’t take themselves too seriously.
Bowling For Soup then played a second year and told us all about it and I was incredibly jealous. So we did the ‘Get Happy’ tour and we were playing in Birmingham and one of the Live Nation guys was there by the name of Steve Homer who is just an utter genius and a wonderful person and he caught our set and he was talking to us backstage and he said ‘I think I may have just found out that you are going to get an offer to play Download’ but it wasn’t 100% and I was freaking out and bouncing off the walls. I spoke to the guys and told them that it might not happen and we were at the hotel waiting to get picked up to go to the airport to fly back home and I checked my emails on one of those pay terminals where you put a pound in and we’d had an offer from Live Nation to play Download.
We hadn’t left England yet and none of the guys knew and they’ll hate me for this when the book comes out, but I didn’t tell them and I kept it to myself the whole plane flight. I was in a joyous rage the whole flight and they were wondering why I was so happy, but I waited until we got home to tell everybody as I wanted to give them a nice surprise, because when you get home after a big tour like that you do get depressed for a few days, so then I got to drop that on them. So the joy of the tour continued.
Our biggest fear was ‘we’re not a metal act’ and our names not out there yet, we are going to get bottled. We were inventing crazy skits in our head, like we’d come out dressed like My Chemical Romance, rip our faces off Scooby Doo style and it’s us and everybody likes it!
We got to the festival and saw everybody camped out and we’d already decided that we were going to make a weekend of it. A lot of bands we know come in for the one day and then they leave. But this was our first UK festival, so we thought that we were going to suck this up!
It was a real dream come true. Just to be there to check out the backstage and we turned into real autograph stalkers. We had cancelled a show just to get down there early, because we didn’t want to come in, never having played the festival, not knowing what was up. So we got in day one and hung out and then I woke up next day with no sleep and a ton of drinks in me. I packed my bags and will
never forget the walk that I had to do, because we I woke up it was so early that the trolleys weren’t running yet from where the buses were, so I took my suitcase and I had to walk that entire track; walked all the way from the backstage, walked all the way to my stage, I walked about 2 miles at six in the morning, just to take a cold shower, because I wanted to be completely ready for the show.
We were the second band on the stage and we were convinced that no one would be there. But I will never forget walking around that ‘big top’ and taking a look at the crowd and the place was 75% full and we were ecstatic; we could have went home, we didn’t have to play one note that day, ‘we’d drew a crowd at Download!!!’ we were just freaking out.
So we proceeded to go on that stage and the energy level and the excitement and the emotion that we had was such a high that I feel it was one of the better shows that Army Of Freshmen had ever played. The energy level of the crowd was nuts, everybody was into it, there were no bottles; it was just a dream. It was like being on cloud nine, to see a tent like that and everybody’s happy.
My most intense memory of being there at Download was of Marilyn Manson. He’s really exciting, but the security made everybody backstage, even legitimate rock stars, made everyone go to the sides and stay in their room, so that he could make the walk from his backstage to a van!
I thought it was really pretentious, because I really believe that you create the scene around yourself that you want to create. OK, if you are famous, people are going to stop you, but its how much attention you bring upon on yourself and if you make everybody stop and bow down for ten minutes, so you can pass by, you are going to create an air and energy about yourself. So of course I was kind of transfixed and I went to see the set and I thought he was incredibly lacklustre, seeing Marilyn Manson in the daylight and watching his make-up dry off! I had to be crammed in a hallway for 15 minutes so this idiot could walk by to play a bad set!
From that nine year old kid watching MTV and hearing about the festival, to literally 15 years later being an artist there. The aftershow party was amazing, getting our pictures taken with the guys from Maiden and Pantera; one of the greatest days in Army Of Freshmen’s history was when we played Download.”
Chris Jay (Army Of Freshmen – Vocals)
“Download was one of the best weekends of my life. I grew up as a ‘metal head’ so to be walking around backstage and bumping into Bruce Dickinson, Vinnie Paul and all the guys from Slayer, I was literally 8 years old again and googly eyed. When I spoke to Vinnie Paul I was literally shaking and the picture I took came out blurry, because I was so intimidated.
I tried to see as many bands as possible and there wasn’t one band who wasn’t ‘beyond nice’ and didn’t put on a great show. I thought Lamb Of God were amazing, I was a casual fan before that, but now I’m sold. Mastodon were also SO good and it was the third time that I’d seen Machine Head and they were brilliant.
One day I was in one of the shuttle buses to the stage and there were two of the guys from Machine Head, Jeff Hanneman and his guitar tech. I was just sat in the back of the shuttle and these four guys got in and I was just listening to them talk. Then I was just staring at one of Jeff Hanneman’s custom guitars and all I wanted to do was to sit down and play one Slayer song on it.
The cool thing is the access you have, because all the bands walk around and watch every other band and everybody just wants to have a good time.
We were on pretty early in the morning; we were the second band on that stage, at the same time as Hell Yeah, which were Vinnie Paul’s new band. We thought that we were going to go out and play to nobody, but it was packed. It went off swimmingly and we were on cloud nine the rest of the day.
I was the first one up and the last one to sleep every single day. Half of the guys like metal, half don’t. So they were like ‘I’m just going to go and have a wander around’, but I was running frantically from stage to stage; I even typed up a schedule for every day, of all the bands that I wanted to see. I like to watch the bands from the crowd, because watching from the stage, the sound isn’t so good and you can only see half the band, but when you go out with the crowd, that’s where you really get the energy.
There were some kids at the mainstage, waiting all day just for Marilyn Manson, which was a little weird and I thought he had one of the worst sets of the day and I like his music a lot, but I just thought his song choices were weird.
One of the big intrigues that spread round the whole festival was that people were going to see My Chemical Romance, because of what happened to them at Reading & Leeds. People were really angry about that band. I saw people tearing down posters and making signs! There were so many haters throwing bottles, but none of them hit the stage, maybe one or two, but it was cool.
The whole atmosphere and the fact that they can bring so many people to the festival and keep it all under control, with the exception of a few fires at the end, is just so great. We can’t do festivals like that in the States. Woodstock was the last one and a bunch of dumb American tough guys turn up and try to hit on girls and do a bunch o’ crap; but Donington is the biggest metal festival in the world, with a load of nice people just there to enjoy the day. Beautiful countryside, movies at night and the camping grounds! I walked around the campsite one night and there were some people there who just camp and hardly step foot near the music!
And everyone is SO nice. To be at Donington as a metal head, it is THE Festival, so I’d dreamt my whole life of going, let alone being a part of it; when I was a kid it was Donington, which is what it will always be to me. It was just incredible.”
Kai Dodson (Army Of Freshmen – Bass)
“Over the years I’ve been there as a PR for Bowling For Soup, Art of Dying, DV8, Zebrahead and Army Of Freshmen and worked with Tool in the torrential rain at Ozzfest’s visit to the site in 2002.
Download is a brilliant opportunity to new and mid-size bands to meet key media all in one place, as well as perform to a broader rock/metal audience than they would usually get at their own shows. A successful Download performance can really help a band breakthrough in the UK. It’s been really rewarding for me to see Army Of Freshmen prove so successful at the festival as it was always a big ambition of theirs’ to play at such a legendary event. They performed to a packed third stage tent in 2007 and 2008, even though they’re unsigned, and it has definitely helped to significantly increase their British fan-base and media presence.
The festival always has an incredible line-up, mixing upcoming artists with rock legends and every band playing will be excited to see at least five other acts, so working as a band’s publicist can be like trying to hold mercury. I always ask my artists to tell me in advance which bands they want to watch so I can schedule their press around it, but you can guarantee that a band member will suddenly disappear just when he’s needed. I’ll find him having his photo taken with Nikki Sixx or Slash, or over at the third stage catching that years’ Next Big Thing!
The rock/metal world is pretty small so every time I go to the festival I’ll bump into bands and crew that I’ve worked with, or toured with, and it can be like a family reunion.”
Emma Watson (PR – Bowling For Soup/MC Lars/Zebrahead)
“And so to my third Donington.... Different band, different stage, different day. Would it be as good after the past two experiences? In a word 'yes'.
We played early in the day and weren't expecting much more than a 'front row' to greet us. We were wrong. The marquee was packed for that time of day and we (Malpractice) played probably our best gig to date. The gig took on a life of its own, and by the end of the set the smiles and sweat weren't just onstage. Not bad for the 'early slot'... too bad it had to end so soon. Thanks Adam, Benny, Spreader and Paddy for that one.
Hopefully it will be back to the main stage at some point in the (not too distant) future... who knows. One day.”
Mark Chapman (Malpractice – Guitar)
“It went really well, I think that the
turnout of the crowd was much better than anything we could have expected; we were expecting a couple of hundred people to turn up at the front, but the tent was absolutely rammed from the front of the stage, right to the back and some people standing outside of the tent as well. They were just cheering before we started, it was ace! It was definitely the best show that I have ever done. The day was way beyond all of our expectations really.
We watched Motley Crue on the Saturday night, we were quite a way back but they just sounded phenomenal.
We camped in the normal campsite with all our friends and girlfriends; it’s just part of the whole festival experience really, with the added bonus that we got to play it.”
Venno (Beyond All Reason – Vocals/Guitar)
“It was an amazing gig, I really enjoyed it and I couldn’t believe how many people were in the tent, I didn’t really expect it.
It was just really, really good just to be part of the festival; just seeing the amazing bands that were playing and then getting to play at the same festival.
We hadn’t actually been to this festival before, but it was one that I had always wanted to go to because of all the good bands that are always playing, everything I’m into really. So to actually play the festival as well, it’s an absolute bonus, the whole thing has just been incredible really and a great experience.”
Russ (Beyond All Reason – Guitar)
“It was absolutely phenomenal. It was the first time that we had played a tent as well and it’s mad that your playing somewhere in the middle of a field, that shouldn’t usually be there.
I wanted to see Iron Maiden and Dream Theater.
Hayseed Dixie on the first day were great on the first day; I can’t believe that they get SO wrecked and still play in time without a drummer!”