It has to be the most horrific thing that can happen in terms of booking. There was no opportunity to find a replacement. We are the great unwashed, who have been pushed away from areas of civilisation where normal, genteel people like to go and sip their lattes, and we’ve been sent out to this field in between a motor racing track and the approach lights of East Midlands airport.Ĭopping Limp Bizkit, who were booked to headline, pulled out five weeks before the festival. Download couldn’t not be there.īruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden frontman ) I wouldn’t describe Donington as a magical place … What makes Donington magical is the people that go there. You could stand there any random weekend and feel something. We did briefly consider Milton Keynes, but they couldn’t accommodate what we needed for camping.Īndy Copping (head booker & Live Nation’s president of UK touring ) Donington is the Stonehenge of rock music. Galbraith Monsters of Rock started at Donington because the Midlands was such a hotbed for rock. And then there was a huge up-and-coming market of younger bands as well. If you looked at rock’s old guard, they were all still selling a lot of tickets. John Probyn ( festival director, Live Nation ) The only real growth areas at the time were dance music and rock. I felt we needed something that was able to embrace that, as well as still cover heritage artists. Stuart Galbraith ( founder of Download & CEO of promoters Kilimanjaro Live ) In the early 2000s, there were whole new genres of rock coming through. With the festival this weekend marking its 20th anniversary with its biggest event yet, the story of its rise is one of community, circle pits and an inordinate amount of urine in bottles … Born from the ashes of the Monsters of Rock one-dayers, recalibrated for rock’s burgeoning new generation and christened with a suitably edgy name that would most definitely never age badly, the Download festival has, since 2003, established itself as the beating heart of a scene with the volume turned up to 11. Ask any of the 100,000-odd people embarking on their annual pilgrimage to the spiritual home of metal, and they’ll jokingly tell you the road to Donington Park doesn’t feel much shorter. A s AC/DC said, “It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock’n’roll”.
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