Download Festival
Donington Park, Leicestershire The great, the good, the disappointing, the done-it-all and the wide-eyed aspirational strut their stuff at the UK’s biggest rock and metal gathering.
Friday
Download: the field of dark dreams where metallers, Vikings, vampires, Sith and Harley Quinn’s toting inflatable AK47s roam free, overlooked by Beelzebub’s bulldog staring down from the hillside. And amid the Dastardly And Minions wander several longhairs in white jeans and T-shirts far too clean to truly honour their grimy godhead The Lord Of The Keg and all its Bud-chugging dominions.
In a shirt that hasn’t seen a biological capsule since 2001, Andrew WK pulls demon faces and plays kungfu keyboards with his microphone down his pants to the sort of monumental glam-pop-metal where every song is a finale, like a psychopathic Meat Loaf on PCP. But what’s this? “I’m never ever gonna lose my way, ever again,” he growls on Ever Again, about a “trip to the dark side”. Has the party turned sour? Has The Dark Side Of The Moon finally come on at AWK’s eternal all-nighter? Then: “Now it’s time for me to play a guitar shaped like a slice of pizza,” he says, indulges in some motivational party speaking, and finally counts down from 100 to the space riff rampage of Party Hard. A panda moshes. That was close.
Jonathan Davis is on stage with a bunch of cellos, and crooning velvet-fingered goth-rock in the vein of Siouxsie And The Banshees. It’s a far cry from his day job as Korn frontman. But Davis revels in the role of vampiric solo artist, clearly relishing the opportunity to air songs from his recent solo debut Black Labyrinth, as well as Forsaken, a rare cut from early-00’s horror flick Queen Of The Damned.
“It’s action time! Move your body, move your mind!” Judging by his passionate party philosophy, The Bronx’s Matt Caughthran has clearly been hanging with Andrew WK backstage. These LA aggro punks certainly share AWK’s intensity. Heart Attack American is pure flamethrower punk, Knifeman sounds like Thor’s keeping time, and Broken Arrow is dedicated to Jesus. There’s the odd grindhouse groove, but it doesn’t sound like The Bronx are getting gentrified any time soon.
Bullet For My Valentine were once a band who seemed guaranteed to headline this festival, but a couple of chronic wobbles in their back catalogue has put a glass ceiling between them and the top spot. But with a shedload of pyro and a slew of new slick, stadium-ready material from upcoming album Gravity slotting in among crowd-pleasers like Tears Don’t Fall and Scream Aim Fire, today the Welsh metallers look and sound like headliners. You never know, their time might still come.
‘A Perfect Circle Eat The Elephant Out Now’, reads a poster by the Zippo Encore (second) stage, and no band here would likely agree more than Bad Religion. The antithesis of ponderous mood metal, the proto Green Day smash through a couple of dozen pop punk twominuters that all get in, chew the throat out of a rabble rock chorus and get out again before they’re caught in a net and humanely destroyed for the safety of the public. Wrong Way Kids is a hellfire hoedown, Social Suicide a grebo ska battle cry, 21st Century (Digital Boy) the sort of melodic bounce-rock tune we should thank/blame for Blink-182. They’re legends for a reason.
British rockers You Me At Six bring proceedings to a close over on the second stage with a slick set of sometimes anthemic, sometimes anaemic pop-rock. Through headphones, tracks like Stay With Me and Spell It Out are aerodynamic, albeit perfunctory slabs of cynically stadium-ready rock, but live they make more sense, packing a punch that stirs even the hardest of hearts. Armed with material from new album VI, the band lay their Main Stage headline aspirations right out on the table and, given the size of Fast Forward’s megalithic, roaring chorus, only a fool would bet against them.
“You’ve got two more days to go, so give me everything you’ve got right now!” demands Avenged Sevenfold’s M Shadows. A bit selfish. Surely we should eke out everything we’ve got over the coming 48 hours so Ozzy gets some. But Avenged sure cram everything they’ve got into their 110 minutes: grimacing hardcore, prog metal diversions, Zep blues rock, Aerosmith riffs, nasal Axl wails, gothic touches and every other hard rock trope they’ve dabbled in during their schizophrenic 17-year trek to the top.
That it’s all mashed up into ever-shifting eight-minute songs, in keeping with the proggy leanings of their latest album The Stage, can make the whole thing feel arduously aimless and leave the crowd grasping at faint melodic threads for guidance.
But AS aren’t short of an iconic moment or two: Hail To The King rides in on a crowd chant of “Hail! Hail!” that feels like a Nuremberg full of neck-beards; a huge inflatable skeleton astronaut rises from the stage during the Muse-like Higher. And there are a brace of touching tributes: Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here to Anthony Boudain, and So Far Away to former Avenged drummer Jimmy ‘The Rev’ Sullivan, who died in 2009, a tear-jerker almost ruined by someone turning the drums up to ‘nose-bleed’.
It’s epic, bloodthirsty necrophilia anthem A Little Piece Of Heaven that steals the show, though, by blowing the lid off Avenged’s genre box to take in surf pop, psych Cossack and a stirring chorus straight out of Magical Mystery Tour or Ziggy Stardust.
Saturday
With the Zippo Encore stage running late, we miss the Von Hertzen Brothers and instead hit The Struts on the Main Stage, where Jagger/Quatro hybrid singer Luke Spiller is doing aerobic dance moves in a golden jacket and demanding some pretty taxing vocal call-backs for this time of day. A master of crowd-rousing in the Mercury vein, Spiller star-jumps and high-kicks his way through some Stonesy glampop stormers like Could Have Been Me that are already making dents in America. The band The Darkness could have been.
Now, anyone with a flake or two of sawdust in their bloodstream loves a bit of deep-south bar boogie, but you’ve got to question The Temperance Movement today. Scotland’s answer to The Magpie Salute (a question no-one was really asking), they reconstruct the sort of voodoo blues Americana that’s previously been reconstructed by the Faces, Zeppelin, Primal Scream, The Black Crowes and even Paul Weller, without adding an ounce of individual personality. Hence they have the feel of a Glasgow Nashville theme pub, chicken dancing their way through
Caught In The Middle (an occupational hazard for the by-numbers roots rock band) and Battle Lines, more reverence than reinvention. A little less stylistic temperance, please, and a little more movement.
Although L7 were never one of the biggest sellers of the grunge boom, their brash brand of rock has aged remarkably well. When singer Donita Sparks tossed her bloodied tampon into a hostile crowd at the Reading Festival in 1992, the band gained legendary status, but, as today shows, they also had the tunes to justify it. Drummer Dee Plakas broke her arm 48 hours, ago and Adam Ant’s drummer Jola has stepped into the fold admirably to ensure that from a snarling Andres to a corrosive Shitlist and airpunching Pretend We’re Dead, this is everything we want an L7 set to be: sharp, fun and lavishly bad-ass.
Arriving on stage to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck (what else?), 90s survivors Thunder provide a mid-afternoon blast of punchy, polished, lightly raunchy party rock that mostly hits the spot. No longer the cocksure long-haired pretty boys of their Top 20 prime, these light-metal Londoners now look like sensible, crew-cutted dads rocking out in their weekend hobby band. But in his head, Danny Bowes is clearly still playing Wembley, and his cheeky crowd-baiting patter is infectious. “Some of you don’t know this, do you?” he says, grinning, after failing to muster a mass singalong during The Devil Made Me Do It. “Fuck that, I’ll do it meself.”
The mysteries of Babymetal get deeper and stranger with each Download appearance. Playing further up the bill than ever before, presumably because Saturday is not a school night, Japan’s premiere bubblegum metal-punk teenage comic-book sci-fi superheroes appear to have lost one of their three original singer-dancer-ninja trio, Yuimetal, and gained two more. Why? Who knows. Such are the occult secrets of Babymetal.
Performing their tightly drilled martial-arts moves in long black-and-gold robes, these four female performers now look more like fearsome warrior monks than fantasy schoolgirl sex-bots. Between steam cannon blasts and unsettling video warnings about an apocalyptic pan-dimensional battle between good and evil, classic Babymetal songs like Gimme Chocolate!! and Karate seem to lose some of their former shock value, their visceral techno-metal shudders and blowtorch speed-thrash solos more muted than usual. All the same, this sense-blitzing beast from the East is still the most punk-rock spectacle that Download will witness all weekend.
Six albums in, Kentucky’s Black Stone Cherry are on the verge of headline status at rock mega-gigs like Download, thanks to (take note, The Temperance Movement) the immeasurable heft and character they put behind classic southern country rock. Opening in weighty, ferocious mode with Burnin’ and 2008’s Blind Man, they playfully throw in a jaunty cover of The Wailers’ Stir It Up ahead of doobieson-the-back-porch anthem Me And Mary Jane, and really let in the breeze once they shake the sawdust from their boots, drop the top and send Like I Roll careering down the freeway. They’re not bereft of dustbowl dirges and Nickelbackish moments (White Trash Millionaire is hardly much classier), but there’s real fun to be had too – Blame It On The Boom Boom is a hip-shaker for those who believe the boogie was wrongly convicted, and Cheaper To Drink Alone certainly helps the crate of Special Brew I’ve hidden in the corner of the press tent go down smoother.
When punters are asked for their weekend highlights, many are bound to name-check the moment Parkway Drive, one of metal’s canniest, hardest-working bands, finally stepped up to the headliner leagues. Opener Wishing Wells, Prey and
The Void, all from new album Reverence, sound impossibly huge, adding pace and depth to an already thunderous set. The production has been beefed up too, and come a pulverising Crushed and Bottom Feeder you can’t see vocalist Winston McCall for shooting flames, while drummer Ben Gordon is strapped in, drumming his arse off upside down on a revolving drum kit. Glorious.
Saturday’s heavyweight headliners are Guns N’ Roses, playing a rare festival show on their hugely successful Not In This Lifetime comeback tour. Do these reconstituted bad-boy legends truly merit their bloated three-hour stage time? Not quite, there’s too much flab and padding in the mix. Even so, the palatial anthems and guitar-shredding pyrotechnics outweigh the knuckle-dragging dirges.
GN’R might have lost some of their youthful vigour and sexy danger during those lost decades of bitter feuds and bizarre hair, but they’ve gained in maturity too, with mostly positive effect. At 56, Axl Rose’s voice is less piercing shriek than soulful croak nowadays, straying into late-period Bowie territory on several numbers. Once cheesy schlock, November Rain strikes a newly elegiac tone at Donington, even though Rose performs it straddling a motorcycleshaped piano stool, like one of Jim Steinman rock’n’roll wet dreams come true.
The set-list is largely the same career-spanning banquet that GN’R have been touring for two years, but with a few interesting tweaks. After three decades dormant, the vintage Hollywood Rose number
Shadow of Your Love gets a welcome punky airing. Rose’s wobbly but heartfelt rendition of Jimmy
Webb’s classic ballad Wichita Lineman also makes its UK debut. The cover versions span the full quality spectrum, from a rambunctious Live And Let Die and a rousing Black Hole Sun, to an interminable Knockin On Heaven’s Door which trundles on for several months. Thankfully, Paradise City provides the killer pay-off as the skies above Donington bloom with celebratory rose-red fireworks that are for the most part well deserved. A proper headline show, built on a blockbuster scale.
Sunday
From a distance you might think Bob Dylan, clad in a 1967 kaftan, is covering Led Zeppelin I between chuffs on helium balloons. Closer up, it’s Michigan’s Greta Van Fleet, the latest Zep-rock hopefuls, proving themselves a magical upgrade of winding, melodic retro rock. With guitarist Jake Kiszka playing solos behind his head and singer Josh Kiszka (they’re basically the mystic-rock Kings Of Leon)
spinning lyrical artistry about heritage, family and new-age crises, in a voice as much Joplin as Plant or Daltrey, they weave brilliant rock billows like Black Smoke Rising, and in a half-hour set even find time for a drum solo – a sign of dedication to the retro cause, or a warning of indulgences to come? We’ll go with the former – for now.
Body Count’s decision to kick things off with a cover of Slayer’s Raining Blood is a stroke of genius, and those nightmarish first notes coupled with rapper Ice-T’s caustic delivery have the desired effect, sending a huge crowd absolutely batty. They deliver a politically pummelling set of blistering moments, from Talk Shit, Get Shot, to No Lives Matter to the controversial Cop Killer. It’s an incendiary set from a band whose railing against the system is more potent and sadly relevant than ever.
You can barely get in the Dogtooth tent for All Them Witches, and it’s easy to see why: the Nashville stoners are a frazzled, kaleidoscopic thrill. Every deep, tectonic groove is delivered with destructive intensity, as well as at intestine-juddering volume. Coupled with the intense heat, it’s akin to standing at the edge of a bubbling, voodoo-induced cauldron. Their main touchstone is evident, of course, with copious amounts of Black Sabbath doom churning among the psychedelia and blues, but the brooding psych rockers have a sound of their own that packs one hell of a punch.
One of the buzzy rising stars lurking on the fringes of Download, Zeal & Ardor bring an enveloping darkness to the Dogtooth Stage on Sunday evening. Founded and fronted by SwissAmerican singer-guitarist Manuel Gagneux, the multi-vocal collective chant gospel incantations and negro-spiritual lyrics over thick layers of churning, shuddering black metal. It’s an inspired, spellbinding, ritualistic performance that crams an uncanny amount of energy into a compact half hour. The future will surely bring bigger stages and longer sets for them.
“England! Have you brought your singing voices tonight?” hollers Brent Smith of
Shinedown, working the crowd like a motivational speaker. The Florida alt.rockers are certainly slick operators, stoking up the emo kids with sky-punching arena anthems like Cut The Cord and The Human Radio, but
Smith spends way too much of their compact set delivering windy sermons about solidarity, family and the unifying power of rock. Dude, we get it.
That’s why we came to Download in the first place. Also, a word of advice: this is Britain. If you want to win us over, puerile insults and cheap knob gags work way better than pompous platitudes.
There are particular settings in which Marilyn Manson’s high-voltage glam-punk shock-rock pageantry packs a real punch, notably during his own arena headline shows, but he struggles to muster the same electrical charge on a glorious sunny evening in Donington. Manson seems unusually lethargic at Download, barely addressing the crowd as he trudges dutifully through Disposable Teens, The Dope Show, The Beautiful People and more, their chainsaw riffs and zombie-croak vocals sounding more exhausted than excited. So flat is the energy and so sluggish the changeovers between songs, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern whether the set has actually ended or just run out of steam. On a good night, The Antichrist Superstar remains a singular and sharp-witted talent, but this perfunctory show is very hit-and-miss.
Rise Against are the ideal band to headline the second stage on Sunday evening, rousing a weary throng who have been burnt and beaten into submission after days of drinking and relentless sunshine. The Chicago punks never fail to impress, with both an ear for a chorus and their heartfelt, infectious passion, and the set is one huge call to arms. Survive is dedicated to Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington, while Welcome To The Breakdown, one of the highlights from most recent album Wolves, is a fist-pumping punk anthem about “not burying your head in the sand” that rages against racism, gender inequality and homophobia and receives rapturous cheers.
Changing cultural tides might have hit Sweden’s catwalk garage kings The Hives “in my wallet”, but age hasn’t withered them, and diminishing attention hasn’t dampened ‘Howlin’ Pele Almqvist’s cartoonish ego. Arriving on stage in black-andwhite harlequin suits and with ninjas as guitar techs, they remain the greatest retro garage-punk band on the planet, in their heads and pretty much in the real world too. Few hardcore bands can match the visceral melodic rush of Idiot Walk, Die Alright and Hate To Say I Told You So, and new song Paint A Picture combines Beat-era effervescence, volcanic Ramones strut and 50s biker-gang grit as wonderfully as their early-noughties peak.
“Are you ready to go fucking crazy?! I can’t fucking hear you!” Yes, it’s Ozzy Time, and all is right in the hallowed pantheon of rock. Over the next 90 minutes it is never entirely clear whether the 69-year-old clown prince of darkness knows where he is, or indeed who he is, or even what year this is. But no matter. What is plain is that Ozzy Osbourne seems re-energised following Black Sabbath’s hugely successful farewell shows, and the screen-blazing stage production has a similar razzle-dazzle feel.
Mostly drawn from Ozzy’s more melodic solo material, the set includes just three Sabbath tunes, but the centrepiece is a powerful version of War Pigs that segues into an extended instrumental medley, a showcase for guitarist Zakk Wylde who’s on great maximalist form. Squeezed into half the time that Guns N’ Roses had, Ozzy’s closes somewhat abruptly with a stampede of classic numbers including Crazy Train and Paranoid. He might not be the biggest star attraction on this year’s bill, but he remains the perennial guest of honour at heavy rock’s biggest fancy-dress party, and he brings down the curtain with aplomb.