Download at Donington
What, two posts in two days? Shurely shome mishtake! Nay, nay and thrice nay. Well, actually it’s exam week at school and all the exams I have to mark don’t start till tomorrow, so I will be a bit quiet when the madness starts.On Sunday I went to the second day of the Download heavy metal festival. I have been going to such gigs since I was sixteen and still enjoy them. The only problem with this one is that I made the almost fatal mistake of being disorganised. I had been thinking about going for a bit but had done nothing as it was being held on the last day of the summer half term holiday, so I knew I would have to get back from Leicestershire to South East London overnight somehow to be back for 8am the next morning. Then my mate K emailed me, getting really excited about the lineup – Metallica, Slayer, Slipknot, Korn, Machine Head, all bands I knew would deliver on the day or hoped would – and saying that we HAD to go. So I got the tickets and forgot about it. Pants! What an idiot!
Then last week, after the previously advised stag weekend I suddenly realised that I would have to get there and back. I also thought I would give M a call as I had not seen him for a bit and thought he might fancy it. Annoyingly, M dithered and that slowed down my attempts to sort out any transport until the very last minute, causing any number of panic attacks at the end when I thought I would be stranded in the middle of nowhere over night.
In the end M didn’t come and I got the train up there. Simple enough apart from a few missed trains slowing me down and meaning that K had to pick me up from Nottingham, as I had the tickets and it would have been a needle in the haystack job to meet him at the venue.
The only problem was that I still had no transport organised for the journey back as the public transport back was absolutely laughably pathetic. When I went for the first time in 1988 I got the train to and from Manchester, no trouble at all. This time I couldn’t arrange a train, bus or lift back and knew that I would have to try to blag a lift from a complete stranger at the festival. Still I thought it would be okay and I would be able to do that and not take up all of Witho’s suicidally kind offer to pick me up from Derby, a six hour round trip. What an angel!
So we got there and I had a good go at the lift blag but every single person I met was either not going back on the Sunday or going a different direction. So Wonder Witho came to the rescue. Phew!
Oh yeah, what about the gig? Well, it was great. Machine Head were on first of the bands I really wanted to see. They were so energetic and I loved Davidian live, easily one of their best songs from a crushing first CD. I wasn’t a vast fan of their second, but the third and fourth seem to have been a steady return to top form. I liked Robb Flynn and Phil Demmel in Vio-lence, one of my little eighties Bay Area Thrash bands, so I knew they’d be great here. Excellent start!
Then we got the news that Slayer had been delayed and would not be playing on the main stage, causing a bit of a dilemma. Live, they were one of the most brutal bands I had ever seen, but they clashed with Korn who I had never seen live before. In the end we decided to stay for Korn so we would have a good spot for Metallica after them.
So then we saw Slipknot, who were absolutely mental, full of energy from the start, with nine lunatics running around like loonies. I wish I had known their material a bit better, because I think I wiould have appreciated their contribution more had I done so. Even so they were fantastic. What a show!
Korn were up next and I was impressed with what I saw. I do like a bit of variety and there are few bands who would attempt to get bagpipes into a song, never mind carry it off! Again I wished I had listened to their stuff a bit more, but they were very tight live and I would go to see them again. They also played the heavy section from Metallica’s One in a medley, which was cool as K and I had been moaning about Metallica not playing it at Leeds last August.
Finally, a long time after they were supposed to go on, Metallica turned up and played a very short set because Lars Ulrich had been taken ill and they had to use guest drummers. This meant that they mainly played their best, early material, mainly from Kill ‘em all through to Master of Puppets. I was really excited to see Dave Lombardo, best heavy metal drummer of my youth, playing with them, but the guy who stole the show was Joey Jordison from Slipknot. Wow! What a drummer that guy is! He was adding in insane double bass parts that weren’t on the original, which really added value to the show. It was only about ten or eleven songs long, but I will never forget that Metallica set!
So with the aid of Witho I did manage to get back for Monday’s school, even managing to sneak in three or four hours sleep. It was a crazy trip, but worth it!
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