Braving The Alcoholocaust At Download Festival

DOWNLOAD DAY 1: ALCOHOLOCAUST

Before I begin, some housekeeping: I’m determined not to spend the next few thousand words making fun of men in wraparounds and Zelda t-shirts. I do understand that some people aren’t from London, that some people think Salt Rock boots look rather natty, and that smirking derision is no longer the hilarious joke it used to be, but I really can’t promise anything.

And therein lies the problem with metal – for the most part, it’s so easy to make fun of, because white nerds doing dangerous/edgy stuff is always going to end in corpsepaint-thinning tears. For instance, I bet Download seemed like a good name for a festival in 2003 when the Internet was still faintly exotic, but now it may as well be called “Tidy Desktop” or something equally functional and dreary. And if we’re talking branding issues, it’s also hard to deal with the nasty bulldog logo on all the promotional material too. I feel like it could appear on the front page of Hypebeast as a BNP x My Little Pony collab/capsule collection for Bronies, which obviously isn’t great.

But whatever, fat angry dorks are much more "my kinda people" than the subhuman gumbooted scum at Secret Garden Party, and I missed Woodstock ’99, so why not spend a few days sleeping on the ground in the East Midlands so I can attend a festival with the exact same line up?

Cut to: M&S train beers!!

(Not pictured: spilling drugs all over the train loos like Will Self on John Major’s jet)

We really went HAM on the train beers, and by the time we reached Derby I was taking a lot of very boring photographs and being pretty unhelpful about setting up the tent. This image beautifully illustrates both those things:

After I’d been a boozy, cokey prick for a few hours in the VIP area we went to see Korn, who – despite having a rhythm section made up almost entirely of Evangelicals – still bring their A Game, and transported me back to a time when I was pretty into being mad at dad and administering hickeys. I’m 30, so obviously I didn’t get very close to the stage, so visually, this was the best I could do:

You could just watch this too:

Sick, right? Then we finished all the drugs underneath the disabled platform and Slipknot came on. Unlike last time I saw them at Download 2010, when the singer wore bootcut jeans and ruined everything, they were completely jumpsuited up and being genuinely menacing. It was fucking fantastic. Being of an art school-ish disposition, I should probably have gone to see Converge, but a clown spinning around on a drum kit is more fun to watch than a vegan graphic designer grunting and refusing to smile for 45 minutes.

Here’s some more 1999 greatness:

And here’s a little metal fan pic-dump, because it turns out I’m not above that:

I call that last one, "The Lonely Norseman".

That’s all I can remember from Friday, because: drink.

DOWNLOAD DAY 2: PEOPLE = SHIT

Day two began at 6am in the oppressive heat/stench of a £20 Argos tent, with me dealing with that old camping favourite: bladder Sophie’s Choice. Wrestle myself out of the tent, into the dew and lager cans, pull on shoes and walk four hundred yards to the AIDS pit of a toilet area, piss, probably touch someone else’s excreta at some point, then walk back. OR stay in the sleeping bag with a stabbing pain in my abdomen and try to sleep through it. Eventually, fear of soiling myself in front of my tent buddy, Jack, became a real factor, and running the turd gauntlet won out.

I 100% co-sign this assessment of camping:

It really is the worst thing ever.

Here I am trying to power through and enjoying a nice AM lager.

I’m more than happy to make friends with neighbouring campers at 2am when I’ve pushed loads of drugs and booze inside myself, but I don’t even want to talk to the person I’m sharing a tent with for a good hour after I wake up. So when my companion and I are trying to forget that we’re fucking camping by sitting in Argos chairs and drinking lager in silence, you’ll get a frosty reception if you sit down crossed legged by our tent and ponce a can of said lager while getting all Aspergers about Iron Maiden. I’m a fickle guy.

Festival food is completely delicious, and when you drink as aggressively as you have to at a metal festival and don’t take any drugs because apparently metal hates drugs, you end up eating a lot of it. I had two rounds of burgers and chips for lunch from the good people at Full English Breakfast truck on Saturday. The service was friendly, the onions just that perfect side of caramelised, it was really great – I’d recommend them for any event or social engagement you’re thinking of having; mention my name, they’ll treat you like a king. If this kind of food didn’t cause all manner of illnesses I’d eat like this every day of my life.

Musically, Saturday was a great big "whatever" compared to watching Korn and Slipknot while sniffing coke the day before. There were a few highlights though. Some people called Black Star Riders did a load of classic rock covers on the main stage which was a blast. And seeing Mastodon do Rush-meets-Metallica dressed up as fixie riders was great though. Then

Motorhead played at some point, but we’d found a stand up comedian with 400 laughing gas canisters in the press area by then, and who can name more than two of their songs anyway? Plus we were hanging out with the super cool Lady Starlight, who was Lady Gaga’s stylist and stuff for years and is super chill and nice. She played a glam rock DJ set back stage and was really tolerant of my drunk interrorgating.

Headliners Iron Maiden were pretty fun, but Eddie's guitar solos are Biggins panto in Ipswich compared to Slipknot’s spikey gimp mask and double kickdrum assault. Sorry Maids, you’re adorable, and yes, it’s fascinating that Bruce is also an airline pilot, but you can’t shred my face like a bunch of hicks with Ibanez’ can, although I don’t think you were trying to do that anyway.

DOWNLOAD DAY 3: The Gallows Pole

I’ve got more respect for you, the reader, than pretending we stayed at the festival past 11am on the third day. Even the night before, with our nice shoes ruined and our body odours getting weird, we were beginning to remember that camping can suck a fuck, and by 11am we were trudging – yes, trudging – back to the taxi pick up point, thinking how lucky we were to have thought to go for a "burner" set of camping equipment and left it all in the field.

In lieu of an actual review (ew, Rammstein? No thanks, I’m not a fat girl), here are some more flix:

Here I am engaging in a grand festival tradition (“mate, can you settle an argument? What are those things they hang electricity cables from?”)

We caught a banterlope!!!!

This was on an adult male in the backstage area. I said I wouldn’t make too much fun, but this was pretty bad.

Here’s me at 10.

And here’s me at 30. The English public school system is not as failsafe as it once was.

Bob's not on Twitter because he's so fucking metal.