Stephan Burn is a far better and more diligent writer than I will ever be.You can read his Endless Realms blog and find him on Twitter at @onlystephan. He filed this report from the muddy trenches of last weekend's Download festival.
Download was never going to be a
natural fit for me. Not ‘now me’ anyway; maybe when I was younger, but not now.
Now I’m about as metal as tofu. Don’t get me wrong, I rock, I
roll, I’ve even been known to loll around drunkenly. But moshing?
Headbanging? No.
Aside: It actually struck me this
morning that some stereotypical metal shares some of the same kind of
slightly insecure machismo as stereotypical hip-hop. A similar amount
of swaggering around, talking about your ‘bitches’ and how
oppressed you are by The Man. No wonder each genre’s acolytes hate
each other so much: “No, our blend of repression and oppression is
superior to yours, yours is just noise!” I hear them both cry.
So, why did I go to a festival that was
once much more descriptively called Monsters of Rock? Where the
headliners were a band playing an entire album that had ceased to
have meaning to me by the third listen, and a loose collective that
can barely be called anything as cohesive as a band and can barely be
recollected by its shambling leader? Sacrifice. Sacrifice, bloody
loyalty and some bizarre notion of broadening my horizons. Also, I
look good in black.
So there we were: Penny, the aluminium
briquette to my tin foil; Bryce and Olly, hard rockers both. There
were others, a supporting cast of local friends, Twitter followers
and passers-by congratulating me on my pipe, but it was the four of
us who looked a muddy field squarely in the eye while kicking it
soundly in the shin.
The first impression I had was how very
lucky we were to be in a campervan, especially one we didn’t have
to pay for. Two campsites were aflood in mud and all suffered from
sub-Somme conditions. According to a friend who worked the festival,
2000 people went home before day one was out due to weather and/or
tent loss. On Friday night 500 people were put up in the shower rooms
due to either having lost their tent or being unable to find it as
the fields were unlit.
Then there was the ‘entertainment’.
I’ll admit I’ve been spoilt by festivals like Glastonbury where
there is non-band entertainment aplenty, partly facilitated by the
fact that there is no separation between campsite and the music
arena. Download has this balkanisation, but throws a sop to those
wanting something to do between 11pm and 11am by providing The
Village. Imagine Shyamalan’s blunder, but with more burger vans and
a ‘comedy’ tent.
It was not permitted to bring alcoholic
drinks into the arena, an inevitable effect of the fragile economics
of the modern corporate-sponsored music festival. It meant that we
had to queue to buy tokens at £4 each and then queue to trade these
vouchers in for weak Tuborg or Magners. We were drinking, yes, but
never in any danger of proximity to drunk.
After a page
of rambling, you’ll be pleased to hear that I’m going to cover
the music now, yes?
Friday:
We skipped the easy choices of
Terrorvision and Europe, as we only knew one song apiece by these
blasts from the past. Instead we opted for NOFX, the first of many
modern metal/rap/rock/pop/punk (MMRRPP) outfits we saw that I enjoyed
at the time but have now merged into one indistinguishable mess in my
head.
Next up was a wandering expedition
which chanced us on new, young band the Marmozets, who Olly liked and
Penny loved. There was a lot of shouting, but it seemed heartfelt.
Next, a band I was actually looking
forward to! This could well be because, while Chase and Status were a
good opener for headliners The Prodigy, they were a controversial
choice for Download as a whole. Seemingly they went down okay with
the teeming masses, and I enjoyed them immensely in perhaps the least
surprising event of the weekend.
Next up was The Prodigy, who did a
better set than when I saw them last at Glastonbury, with more energy
and revitalised songs. However Penny and I still left them after
about an hour. There was nothing wrong with the performance, they
were doing okay, but I think I could extrapolate the remaining 40
minutes in my head and doubt I’d have been very far from the truth.
Solid, not exhilarating.
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