For rock and heavy metal fans, there is no better location during the latter days of Spring than Donington Park, when the annual Download Festival calls the race track its home for a weekend of head banging, crowd surfing and the best rock in the world.
If your music collection contains anything heavy and loud then Download is undoubtedly the festival for you, with an array of big name acts taking to the main stage since 2003. Even before then, the site was home to festivals such as Monsters of Rock between 1980 and 1996 and in 2002, rock fans worldwide descended on the race course for Ozzfest. It is therefore easy to see why they call Donington Park the home of metal.
Over the years, name to grace the stages of Download have included Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Tool, Deftones, KoRn, Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Linkin Park, Marilyn Manson, Audioslave, The Darkness, Slipknot, Slayer, Bullet for my Valentine, Amplifier, Black Sabbath, System of a Down, Biffy Clyro, Motörhead, My Chemical Romance, Dredg, The Prodigy, Alice in Chains, Kiss, Faith No More and Def Leppard. But these are just some of the bands that have appeared here across many stages.
The festival itself was thought up as a way of following up the Monsters of Rock festivals that had appeared at Donington Park in previous years, with the name ‘Download’ chosen due to its taboo nature in the music industry. Its first year was in 2003, with festival tickets containing a code so that audience members could download a track from the artists they had seen during the weekend. Though this is no long carried out, the festival continues to embrace the internet for its ability to spread music throughout the world. 2003 saw headliners Audioslave and Iron Maiden take to stage and cement the festival at the top of the rock calendar.
In the years since, the festival has continued to grow and evolve, moving to new locations across the Donington site. Notable events over the years including a secret appearance by Metallica in 2003, a surprise appearance from Will Smith (supporting his wife in Wicked Wisdom) on the main stage in 2006 and a bizarre performance from Marilyn Manson in 2009.
Download tickets sell out quickly, making them highly sought after items, so making sure you attend the biggest event on the heavy metal calendar means being on the ball. It is not something any rock fan would regret.
