Live Review : Download Festival on June 8th 2023

The phrase “Scream for me Donington!” is ubiquitous in heavy metal’s lexicon. One of the joys of this weekend is watching the obvious pleasure that uttering those words gives to almost every musician playing the event. The fact that it coupled with the refrain “I’ve always wanted to say that” tells you everything about the importance of Donington Park not just to British heavy rock but to the whole scene in general. We may be celebrating Download’s twentieth incarnation, but the reverence given to what is essentially a second-rate racetrack shows that adulation goes back much further than that.

For sixteen years Donington Park was home to Monsters of Rock, a one-day heavy metal jamboree that existed in the days when festivals were still firmly a counter-culture affair. It was a gathering of the tribes that operated as Mecca for those who craved heaviness in their music and its influence is still felt to this day (hell even Dangermouse has gleefully aped it with the Monsters of Poultry festival).

Download is a modern-day, multi-day and multi-stage resurrection of that simple premise of sticking a load of metal fans in a field and selling them piss-poor lager whilst they consume the biggest names on the scene. A lot has changed, but there is still something primal about 100,000 outcasts and misfits sharing their non-conformity. This is an elongated four days special to celebrate Download’s faltering steps into adulthood and they have gone for broke with not one but two headline shows from by far the biggest name in Metal, the mighty and world-conquering Metallica. However the biggest shift to be found is the move away from heritage acts. Up until now, the Download bill has been bolstered by names that felt plucked from another age. Not this year. Aside from Carcass (who get a free pass for inventing modern metal) and the aforementioned Metallica, the rest of the running order is exclusively made up of bands that have come into existence during the twenty years that Download has ruled the roost. It feels like a distinct coming age for modern metal, like the younglings have finally had the stabilizers taken off and given the keys to the door.

For day one all roads lead to Metallica. Because of the behemoth nature of the San Franciscan over-lords, nobody shares their air-time and all stages shutdown to accommodate their heft. Until then though, it is a choose your own adventure journey through four stages of metallic goodness. Now the well-trodden and sensible route would be the mainstream undercard of Mammoth WVH, Jinjer, Halestorm and Alter Bridge on Main stage (see Sweden Rock for those). However we are ROCKFLESH and we haunt the lesser taken highways, so we instead choose a different path and start with the motherfucking Cancer Bats on second. Given that when they kick off they are the only band playing, so does everyone else. It is blissful to see a band as nihilistically noisy as the Cancer Bats draw this size of crowd. They are as bratish and irreverent as ever and end up having their power pulled when they steadfastly refuse to leave the stage. A corrosive and crushing start to the day.

The Bronx carry on with the raging anti-socialness. They are veteran perpetrators of indignant West-coast punk and seem perfectly at home in the mid-afternoon slot. The other stages have by this time swung into life, so their audience is more select than what was afforded The Cancer Bats however they still manage to persuade a good few thousand to kick up the dust. Politically coherent and driven by a pulsating groove they prove a highly effective gateway drug into the four days of Mayhem to come. 

The Dogtooth stage has finally been given a size that befits its appeal. This year it is treble its previous capacity and manages to expend all that available space by attracting every soul under eighteen to witness the Caskets. The issue is that at fifty I have heard this all before.  Their fisher price emo may speak to the emotional turmoil of the teens but to those who have ridden around the block a dozen times, it just feels facile and rather tedious. Though if they are headlining this place in a couple of years that is me told. 

 A.A Williams is about suited to the good times vibes than a polar bear is suited to a weekend in Ibiza. The sun is up and the beers are flowing, yet our Alex still manages to be gloriously miserable. This is divine slo-fi deconstructed metal at its finest. It is beautifully constructed, full of pain and pathos. It is the sound of a thousand hearts, all breaking simultaneously. Social awkwardness never sounded so divine.

Haken have realised that what most purveyors of prog metal have missed is that at the heart of prog was a good old fashioned good cheeky British sense of humour. Rather than being poe-faced, Genesis and Pink Floyd were actually fuelled by that slightly risqué British sense of the absurd. It wasn’t actually surrealism that drove them, it was potty-faced British titillation. There is a glint in Haken’s eye. Their version of prog is warm, boisterous and full of wit. It is also studiously beautiful and the twenty-five minutes (took them longer to set up) passes in an instant.

There is a really interesting mix of the convinced and the curiously convincible gathered for Pertubator headline set. With his and Carpenter Brut's headline sets, synth-wave has quietly but effectively made it over the fence into the Download world. The best way to describe a perpetrator show is umpteen variations of the Equalizer theme tune. It's John Carpenter on steroids with added Satanism. It is also fantastic fun and the amassed throngs bounce away merrily.

We may well have all taken different paths to get there but the entire inhabitants of Donington Park converge at one endpoint and that is Metallica. Not only are they the biggest band in metal, they quite simply one of the biggest bands in the entire world of music. It's rather head-scratching that a bunch of gawky misfit teenagers who were making heavy nasty music have managed to morph into the commercial juggernaut that they are today. Metallica has eclipsed anything we have ever seen in metal and the sold-out signs that adorn the download posters are there quite simply because of their presence this weekend. Book Metallica and you are guaranteed an additional 50,000 sales. 

As "a long way to the top if you Want to rock 'n' roll" booms out across the field there is a palpable sense of anticipation. The fact that this is show number one of two that we will witness over the weekend brings with it a really interesting sense of jeopardy and expectation. What will they start with? How will they pace themselves? Will it feel like an individual performance or the first half of a larger whole? In fact, appropriately for the week of the champions league final, tonight feels akin to the first leg of a two-game champions league semi-final. 

However, Metallica haven't got themselves to where they are today without knowing steadfastly what they are doing. This evening we get a fantastically orchestrated and architecturally brilliant set. They open, as is their norm, with ‘Creeping Death’ and then with little fanfare it is straight into ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ and ‘Leper Messiah’. Three bonafide bangers one after another that throws the gauntlet down with utter panache.

We always knew the inclusion of new tracks from “72 seasons” would slow down momentum but coming after the ferocity of the opening salvo, Lux Æterna and screaming suicide feel positively palatable if not actively welcomed. The sequence from them back into fade to black is genius as is sandwiching the evocative singalong of nothing else matters between the girth of Orion and just downright dirty heaviness of sad but true. Whatever you want to say that Metallica God they know how to write a set list.

 Papa Het’s personal demons have been well-publicized and he seems much more measured and introverted individual from my past encounters with him. We still get all that Metallica family who-ha but there is a level of reservation and contemplation that was not there before. In counterpoint, Lars seems to be having the time of his life. He gurns, he grunts and he pounds seven shades of shit out of his two drum kits. This is a man who is doing exactly what he wants to do in life, making a frigging fortune from it and having an utter whale of a time.

Given that there is almost 5 hours of time to fill with music over the two shows, it feels like a game of musical bingo trying to second guess what comes next. ‘Blackened’ is a wonder of elongated nihilism, whilst ‘Fuel’ sees them go over the top with the Pyro and I can almost see the eyebrow singeing from my vantage point on the accessibility platform. We get a promise of two more tracks and ‘Seek & Destroy’ is dragged out in all its puerile and self-absorbed glory. As we anticipate the final ingredient in tonight's melting pot (the band is very clear they are not doing encores on this tour) there is a real sense of curiosity about what they will choose to end with. All the needless contemplation is ended as the so familiar refrain from Master of Puppets rains out across the fields of Derbyshire.

The simple fact is Metallica performance is unlike anything else you will experience from any other band. It has always been about the interaction of four virtuoso musicians and whilst the staging is impressive is actually really rather minimal. What Metallica do is create an interactive bubble that makes everyone feel included even if you are stuck (like I am) in what may well be another county. This evening they are extraordinary and the customary after-show monologue from Lars backs out the feeling that this isn't just another stop on the never-ending itinerary. It means a lot for them to be here and that passion, that importance absolutely gushes out. Unstoppable, invincible, and wonderful. And it's still only half-time.