HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Download Festival
As Rock and Roll All Nite ended KISS’ explosive set at Monsters Of Rock in 1996, nobody could have foreseen it would mark the end of an era. What started as a one-off mega show to complete RAINBOW’s Down To Earth tour in 1980 had developed into a British institution; the location of Donington Park in Derbyshire became a mecca for rock and metal fans in the UK and, for the best part of sixteen years, those with a penchant for heavy music had an annual getaway to enjoy…not for much longer.
Struggling to find suitable headliners, the 1997 edition was cancelled; subsequently, so was the event itself. Monsters Of Rock was dead; for the rest of the decade – and indeed, into the new millennium – there would be no major music gatherings at Donington. However, 2001 saw the location used for the Rock And Blues Festival and a widely acclaimed STEREOPHONICS concert as part of their A Day At The Races tour. The following year, rock and metal returned to the site when Ozzfest came to the UK, suitably under the tagline “Rock Comes Home”. The success of the event was undeniable and showed that Donington was crying out for a regular rock festival to be back on its hallowed turf.
Step forward Live Nation promoter Stuart Gailbraith. Alongside chief booker Andy Copping, he proposed and birthed a brand-new, two-day festival in 2003 to be held at Donington and become the natural successor to Monsters Of Rock. The name of the festival was chosen for two reasons: one, the internet was exploding and would provide connectivity between festival and fans; two – and much more prevalent at the time – receiving music digitally and file sharing was considered an underhanded tactic within the industry. Well, rock had always been seen as the rebellious child of said industry, and thus the new upstart festival was christened Download.
The first edition, taking place at the end of May and beginning of June 2003, went hard. 56 bands played over the two days, with IRON MAIDEN and LIMP BIZKIT booked to headline the event in a way to appeal to both the Monsters Of Rock veterans and the new generation of heavy music lovers. However, LIMP BIZKIT would pull out, resulting in organisers bumping everyone on the Main Stage up one place, giving the headline slot to AUDIOSLAVE instead. There would be a further knock-on effect at the festival itself, but this one was much more positive – initially, METALLICA had offered to replace LIMP BIZKIT, but their spot atop of the Reading And Leeds bill that year prevented this. So, with no soundcheck and having played an exclusive show at Riverside Studios in London the night before, they showed up completely unannounced on the Sunday afternoon and tore through the Scuzz Stage, blowing the minds of everyone who had been waiting for THE REAL MCKENZIES and giving Download its first major memory.
A year later, METALLICA would return to officially headline the event alongside LINKIN PARK, but that would also be one of notoriety; they’d arrived without a drummer. With Lars Ulrich hospitalised in Germany following a severe anxiety attack on the plane over, the biggest metal band in the world turned up over an hour late, with Ulrich’s drum tech Flemming Larsen, SLAYER’s Dave Lombardo and SLIPKNOT’s Joey Jordison in tow; the result was a 70-minute triumph in the face of adversity, METALLICA going two for two on memorable Download moments.
As the 00’s progressed, Download grew stronger. The expansion to three days in 2005 has been a staple of the festival ever since and, whilst the move from the inner circuit of Donington Park to a site south of the racetrack in 2009 severed its last physical ties with Monsters Of Rock, it had revitalised Donington as the spiritual home of British rock and metal. The memories kept on coming too – BLACK SABBATH bringing an Ozzfest takeover in 2005. KORN playing with multiple vocalists due to Jonathan Davis’ illness in 2006 before METALLICA played Master Of Puppets (1986) in its entirety. IRON MAIDEN headlining at Donington for a record fifth time in 2007 as DEVILDRIVER turned the whole of the Dimebag Darrell Stage tent into a circle pit. SLIPKNOT rising to headliner status in 2009 and delivering one of the greatest bill-topping shows in the festival’s history, beautifully captured on the live DVD (sic)nesses.
However, as the decade finished, Download was confronted with a brand new challenger. In the years that had passed, Stuart Gailbraith had left Live Nation and become CEO of Kilimanjaro Live; collaborating with John Jackson, the pair set about creating a touring festival that aligned with Gailbraith’s desired for a UK event; the result was Sonisphere. Coming out of nowhere in 2009 with METALLICA and LINKIN PARK as its first headliners, suddenly the monopoly that Download held as the UK’s flagship rock festival was at risk of being toppled, and the back-and-forth between the two as the 2010’s rolled around was the subject of much excitement. Yet, the fall of Sonisphere was as quick as its rise – the 2012 edition was cancelled for various reasons and, despite a return in 2014 to celebrate forty years of music on its home site of Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, it then disappeared completely, never to return.
Meanwhile, Download rolled on. The 2010’s saw more highlights: RAMMSTEIN’s incendiary headline slot in 2013. A wayward social media comment landing DYING FETUS a slot on the Main Stage in 2014, the same year that stage was named in honour of the late Stephen Sutton, who had attended the 2013 edition as part of his bucket list while fighting terminal illness and raising £4 million in the process. MUSE turning up to headline in 2015 against a gatekeeping backlash that they ‘weren’t metal enough’ and shutting everyone up. A partnership with WWE that saw its developmental brand NXT bring wrestling to the arena. 2012’s BLACK SABBATH headline slot, defiant in the face of Tony Iommi’s recent cancer diagnosis, the same weekend that MACHINE HEAD whipped up 29 circle pits during their set, a record that still stands. And, if we’re talking about 2012, we can’t omit that year along with 2016 and 2019, a triumvirate that saw the festival do battle with weather conditions so inclement that even Glastonbury would have taken one look and said ‘Yeah, that’s a bit much.’
And so, we arrive at the present decade – whilst COVID-19 forced the first ever cancellation of the festival in 2020, the following year saw the Download Pilot, a limited 10,000 capacity event designed to help open up live music. It was an unmitigated success, and the festival returned to full strength in 2022. In a matter of days, the festival will celebrate its twentieth birthday, expanded to four days in celebration and boosted by its first ever full sell out – 90,000 people are expected to attend over the whole of the weekend, this year headlined by METALLICA (twice), BRING ME THE HORIZON and SLIPKNOT. Speaking of the former, as Lars Ulrich said in the teaser video for the 2009 edition, “If you’re a hard rock fan, this is Ground Zero; this is the centre of the universe.” He wasn’t wrong then, and he isn’t wrong now. Download Festival, the world would be a much, MUCH poorer place without you in it.
All together now…
SCREAM FOR ME, DONINGTON!
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