Looking at it today, Download Festival is an institution.
It stands as a beacon of awesomeness to all fans of metal music.
Attended by rockers and metalheads from all over the globe, Download Festival is the biggest annual gathering of fans of the genre in England.
Located at the historic Donington racetrack, which has its own legacy of hosting motor sport and gigs for over 40 years.
However, Download Festival had to start somewhere, right?
It isn’t some mystical event that’s been around since before records began, or just popped into existence one day.
So in this blog post we’ll take a look back to see how it started, as we look into the history of Download Festival.
Monsters of Rock
The origin of Download Festival is with an entirely different festival!
Monsters of Rock was a music festival that ran from 1980 to 1996
(With two years missed: 1989 and 1993).
The festival was a one-day event held at Donington Park.
Throughout its run, the festival hosted 113 bands and the average attendance was around 71,000 people.
For a one day event dedicated to metal music, that is quite the achievement!
The festival even became international, moving to Europe and South America. The last Monsters of Rock I am aware of took place in 2016 in Germany.
The Monsters of Rock at Donington was still a full-on festival though, packing plenty of huge metal acts into the single day.
Some of the biggest names to play the festival include:
- AC/DC
- Metallica
- Ozzy Osbourne
- Iron Maiden
- KISS
As well as dozens of others. I found a website that listed all the bands who performed at all the Monsters of Rock festivals, including in other countries.
The festival wasn’t just host to huge, world-dominating bands though.
In 1986, a small, unknown band played earlier in the day…
Bad News
This joke band, Bad News, formed as part of an episode of The Comic Strip Presents.
The band was intentionally bad and poked fun at Heavy Metal stereotypes. For a longer read on this band, check out my blog post on them.
However, by the mid-to-late 90s, festival attendance started to decline, and 1996 became the last year for Monsters of Rock.
(Again, the festival did continues overseas, but this blog post is about the history of Download Festival, not a history of the Monsters of Rock.)
After the ’96 festival finished, that was it.
For a long time after this, heavy metal just didn’t have a festival presence in the UK.
Bands put on gigs, and more mainstream festivals did host some metal bands, but there was no collective event to showcase just metal music.
Not for another 7 years…
Download Festival
After a long absence, Monsters of Rock was eventually revived by Stuart Gilbraith and Andy Copping in the early 2000s.
In 2003, Download Festival burst onto several stages around Donington park.
Held between the 31st May – 2nd June, the 2-day event boasted such acts as:
- Iron Maiden
- Marilyn Manson
- Deftones
- Sepultura
- Audioslave
- Stone Sour
There was even a surprise secret set by Metallica on the second stage!
The cost for a weekend ticket + camping by the way, was only £82.50!
A huge upgrade from Monsters of Rock, Download Festival had doubled the amount of time, and at least trebled the number of acts to play!
That first year was a huge success and the festival has been running ever since.
Stats
Here are some fun stats and facts about the festival!
- Since 2003, Download festival has taken place 17 times (not counting 2020)
- Over 1,800 bands have played (1,841 by my count)
- Around 80,000 people attend each year (Well that’s what everyone says but I can’t find any official figures)
- The daily attendance capacity is 110,000 people.
- A 2018 survey revealed Download Festival was the filthiest festival in the UK. However, I imagine a lot of Download fans would take that as a badge of pride.
What’s in a name?
Looking at it now, the name Download Festival is just an accepted thing.
That is what the festival is called.
But back in 2003, the name was much more than that.
It was a statement.
It was only 3 years earlier, in 2000, that Metallica sued Napster regarding downloading music.
The concept of downloading music was a hot topic at the time, and generally seen as seedy or, at best, unethical.
Then comes along this music festival literally called Download Music Festival.
To really make the point obvious, in 2005 they even had a stage called the Napster Stage!
Shockingly (/sarcasm), it was a big hit with kids. This was a festival that understood and revelled in the anti-authority stance of younger people.
In the early years, tickets also included a code that allowed the ticker-holder to download (get it?) some tracks from the bands playing.
Sadly this was was dropped after a few years, but with all the music available from so many places online now, it’s less of the great freebie that it once was.
Music Style
Download festival mostly hosts bands that are hard rock, metal and punk.
Usually the headliners are world-famous artists that have been selling out stadiums for decades.
Sometimes (Annually, really) the festival gets criticised for playing the same bands every few years, rather than risking hosting smaller bands.
It’s also been pointed out that no women have headlined the festival in its 18 years. There is now a Facebook page about this, Get A Woman to Headline 2021.
Fun fact!
In the competition of which band has headlined Download Festival the most number of times, it is currently a 3-way draw, each with 4 headline slots.
- Iron Maiden
- Linkin Park
- Slipknot
The Village & Arena
The festival has a campsite, village and arena.
In the early years the festival was held inside the festival circuit, just like Monsters of Rock had done in the past.
However, this had to be changed because of the size of the festival was too much for the inner circuit.
While Download Festival 2020 was cancelled, there were huge updates to the village and arena that presumptuously will carry through into 2021.
These changes include:
- Hard-standing village
- New campsite and car park locations
- Merch superstore
- Larger Dogtooth stage
- More actions for sustainability
There was even a plan for a Download festival Time Capsule, which I hope does take place!
The plan is for it to be dug up in 2078, 75 years after the very first Download Festival in 2003.
Now let’s look into some famous (and infamous) events from Download history.
Notable events
2006 Riots
2006 was the year that Tool, Metallica and Guns N’ Roses headlined, but this is not what this year is known for now.
On the Sunday night, fires broke out in the campsites. That is fairly common on the last day of a festival as people have one last hurrah.
Usually the chaos dies down before it gets out of hand. Not this year though.
After fire engines were blocked from entering, the riot police were called in and 12 people were eventually arrested.
Afterwards, the download website made a statement:
About 150 people spoiled the end of what had been a great weekend for over 75,000 of us.
John Probyn, Festival Director
AC/DC
The Friday headliner of 2010, AC/DC normally bring a good show.
But this year at Download, they brought their own stage!
No other band was allowed to perform on their stage, it was solely for the use of the band.
For some, this didn’t seem to be in the festival spirit.
It was as if this was both a festival AND an AC/DC gig.
A very strange idea, definitely, and one that did give an idea of pretentiousness, but the show itself got very good reviews and seemed to impress.
No headliner since has had their own platform though, so maybe this will stand as a unique event for AC/DC.
Cashless in 2015
Download festival was one of the first festivals in the UK to test a fully-cashless festival. Your ticket also gave you an RFID wristband.
This could then be loaded up with money and swiped at food and merch stands instead of using cash.
The RFID bands were rife with problems for a significant number of users, and the data collected was then sold on.
In general this was not a great move, and with contactless being so available now, I don’t see this idea making a comeback.
Incidentally, this was the absolute worst year I experienced. If you’d like to read that depressing tale, you can find my page on it here.
Facial Scanning Technology
Also in 2015, facial scanning technology was used by security at Download Festival. Apparently this was the first time it had been used at a music festival in the UK.
It did not receive a warm welcome.
It was criticised by the campaign group Big Brother, and in recent years facial scanning technology has been widely criticised for being invasive and not as effective as once thought.
In 2019 a massive 40 US music festival stated that they would not be using Facial Scanning technology in 2020.
So Download definitely made a whoopsie with that one, but I do applaud them for trying new stuff at the festivals.
I cannot find mention of them using the technology again, so I assume they also took the feedback to heart, which is very good news.
Download TV
In 2020, Download Festival was cancelled due to the Coronavirus.
So in its stead, they held Download TV over the festival weekend.
Download TV was held on the Download social media channels, and included interactive events (RockFit and DOOMyoga), interviews with bands and fans, as well as previous performances from the bands scheduled to play in 2020.
The event was criticised for being too interview-heavy and too light on the actual performances, but that wasn’t really what Download Tv was about.
Also, for a three-day event that was organised in a matter of weeks, and delivered across several social media channels for free, I think the festival did a great job.
The Future
Download Festival has been cancelled in 2020 because of the coronavirus. There’s even a suggestion that the festival won’t be back next year either.
The history of Download Festival has been winding and with a few bumps in the road, and maybe the Coronavirus will cause a few more.
But Download Festival will be back, and will only be bigger and better than ever, that I am sure of.
