Bloodstock Open Air festival, often shorted to just Bloodstock, or BOA, is a heavy metal music festival that takes place every year in August, currently situated in Walton-on-Trent, England.
The festival is known for more extreme heavy metal and has a smaller capacity than other festivals in the UK, but it also has a more dedicated following.
Festival Origins
Bloodstock was originally created by Paul Gregory and his family.
The festival began all the way back in 2001, two full years before Download Festival, 6 years before 2,000 Trees and 8 years before Boomtown.
Bloodstock began as an indoor festival with 2 stages, running for just one day.
Over the years the festival has expanded to a 4-day festival, a huge 4 stages, and in 2023 hosted over 140 bands to an audience of 20,000.
What’s in a name?
The word Bloodstock is actually a collective term for thoroughbred horses, though this is irrelevant to the festival (obviously).
It seems that the festival simply took a heavy metal word, ‘blood’, and added the ‘stock’ suffix to imply a music festal, a la Woodstock.
But then, why the ‘Open Air’ part?
Well, original Bloodstock was an indoor festival, taking place in Derby Assembly Rooms.
However, as the festival quickly grew, in 2005, Bloodstock also took place outside. As a way to differentiate between the two areas, one was named Bloodstock, and the other was called Bloodstock Open Air.
2006 was the last year that that the indoors festival took place.
Since 2007, the outdoors festival has been the only focus, although confusingly it has kept the original name of Bloodstock Open Air despite there no longer being a need to explain that it is an outdoors festival.
The bands
Bloodstock usually hosts more extreme metal bands, covering sub-genres like power metal, thrash metal, prog metal, symphonic metal and death metal.
The title for the band that has headlined Bloodstock the most is actually a 3-way tie at the moment with Nightwish, Children of Bodom and Megadeth all on 3 times each.
Below is a table showing the bands that have headlined more than once, and we can see there’s quite a few, but all of them have only headlined a few times.
Bloodstock does an incredible job or not boring their audience with the same headliners over and over, something that Download festival is certainly in danger of doing.
| Band | Times headlines |
| Nightwish | 3 |
| Children of Bodom | 3 |
| Megadeth | 3 |
| Saxon | 2 |
| Within Temptation | 2 |
| Opeth | 2 |
| Twister Sister | 2 |
| Behemoth | 2 |
| Lamb of God | 2 |
| Slayer | 2 |
| Judas Priest | 2 |
Controversy
The festival has been running for a long time and it’s almost impossible to not stir up any trouble in that time.
However, despite its reputation as a heavy Heavy Metal festival, Bloodstock has, for the most part, has stayed clean.
The festival has faced the usual complaints about a lack of water points and shading (Valid issues given the heat of this summer!), food prices being too high and the common issue this year of dreadful car parking organisation. These are generally minimal complains that all festivals face and should resolve, but they are not headline news.
In fact, the biggest controversy surrounding the festival arose from a single tweet back in 2021.
Bad Tweets
In 2021 the then-Director of the festival, Vicky Hungerford, made some very offensive and ignorant tweets about peoples use of preferred-pronouns.
Preferred-pronouns prefers is what people refer to when they explain how they would like to be referred to: he/him, she/her, they/them, it/its etc.
These started as a way for Trans people to explain their pronouns instead of being misgendered, which is a horrible experience. However the practice has been taken up by some Cis people as a way to normalise it and make Trans people feel less self-conscious about it.
Some people get very mad about this thing that doesn’t matter, and Vicky Hungerford was one of them.
In the now-deleted Tweet, she wrote “If you’re going to start putting pronouns on your emails so I can refer to you as he/him she or her I’m binning your emails.”
Obviously this was not met with rapturous applause from her following, and instead received a lot of backlash.
In response, she apologised, said she was happy to learn how to be a better ally and stepped back from Bloodstock.
However, ‘stepping back’ is a rather unclear phrase and it seems she just wasn’t being very public-facing for a while.
She seems to have taken back the role however, as she was interviewed at Bloodstock 2023 discussing the bands she booked. It seems that Vicky Hungerford has become the face of the festival again.
However, she also hasn’t made made headlines with any more hurtful comments recently, which is good.
Wrap Up
Bloodstock has been going for a long time and has always managed to stay true to its roots and being for the fans.
The festival continually delivers on new headliners and reviews of the festival are always very positive and they have no trouble selling tickets, with some day tickets for 2023 selling out!
Please note that this history has been written by me: I am someone who has always been interested in Bloodstock but never actually gone myself.
In my research for this blog post however, I found an extensive personal history of the festival written from the point of view of a fan who has been to the festival every year. It’s a great read and I highly recommend.
Maybe 2024 will be the year I finally head to BOA though. We’ll just have to wait and see.
