YOUTUBE LIVE
Britain’s flagship metal festival hosts a three-day, mud-free memory feast
FRIDAY
2020 is the first year since 2003 without the annual trip to stand in the rain and watch our your favourite metal bands. To compensate, the good folk who run Download Festival have gone to the effort to make sure we don’t have to go completely cold turkey, setting up a weekend of exclusive goodies spread across their various social media platforms. It’s a lovely gesture, but the first day struggles to find its groove.
It begins with an hour of yoga, which is nice enough, but it’s hardly the massive statement of intent that you’d expect from a festival of this size. We’re then ‘treated’ to some banal interviews with the likes of Arejay from HALESTORM and former BFMV drummer Moose that wouldn’t seem out of place on a pre-school CBeebies broadcast. Things reach a nadir when we’re forced to sit through an excruciating Zoom call from Dinosaur Pile Up talking about their Download memories (one of them ran out of battery on his phone one year and didn’t get the text telling him where to meet the others! Classic!) Mercifully it takes an upward turn when BLACK FUTURES perform a stunning live stream, 20-minute set that reminds you why you tuned in. The evening broadcast still suffers from more of the same awkward interviews, but at least we get some footage from KISS’s 2015 headlining slot, a look at FRANK CARTER AND THE RATTLESNAKES tearing up Download Paris last year, complete with huge circlepit, a bizarre amount of coverage of BIFFY CLYRO (considering they weren’t playing this year) and, best of all, an awe-inspiring look at GOJIRA’s recent Red Rocks set, which, even if you’re watching on a phone, is so powerful it could singe your eyebrows. It took a while to get going, but hopefully the kinks will be ironed out for the rest of the weekend.