Smeatza said:
Download Festival 2011
Kind of the same deal as OP, saw SOAD were headlining and bought my ticket there and then.
I would have payed the full price just to see SOAD and Bowling for Soup two days in a row.
The rain even stopped long enough for Bowling For Soup to play, it started again shortly afterwards. Proving conclusively that as they said, they are Gods favourite band.
One of my favourite festival memories would be Reading Festival 2004, basically to see Greenday on the Sunday night. Unfortunately 50 Cent had been booked to play the festival too, under Greenday and the reaction to this on the forums was unhappy to say the least. Anyway, I decided to stop and watch him to see if he was going to get the abuse that had been promised.
It was better than I expected. As soon as he set foot on stage, he and his G-Unit came under an almost constant barrage of bottles and basically anything that the fans could lay their hands on, not that G-Unit took politely took it, they were giving as good as they got. This continued for the whole 15 minutes Fiddy was on stage, its as if they had been saving those bottles all weekend.
Then there was Download 2006, the year of the Devils curse. You see, I the night before Download I was watching a documentary about The Omen and it got to the point where it was talking about the birdstrike that caused the plane to crash that the producers were supposed to be on. I mention to my brother that the Devil should know which plane to crash. Anyway, it was on the journey to Donnington that I was telling my friend about this and I was just about to repeat my comment when a pheasant flew out and hit the front of my friends car. We laughed, I'm not a religious person but that weekend, I think I pissed off some cosmic force. For a start, the weather leading up to Download had not been that hot, that weekend, it was blisteringly hot for the entire fucking weekend which sapped all energy throughout the day, it was a blessing when it got dark. I got really bad blisters on my feet, it was painful to walk by the end of the weekend. Someone who had come with us was playing football, took a bad tackle and broke his leg. My friends tent got destroyed. Oh, and on the Sunday night, the place erupted into riots where people clashed with riot Police and destroyed a lot of property. Which is odd because that sort of thing had never happened before or since at Download. And the curse had one last sting left in its tail, as we were carrying all our stuff to the car, about 5 minutes from the car, the heavens opened and soaked us all to the bone.
I learned a valuable lesson that weekend. Do not mock the Devil.
I've been to far too many festivals to list everything but yeah, its something that I enjoy doing, I'm not sure which ones I'm going to yet, I'd like to see Rammstein at Download and I'll probably go to Leeds again. I wanted to go to Glastonbury, but woke up too late to get tickets. Maybe next year.
As for gigs, the most recent on I went to was The Joy Formidable at The Rescue Rooms in Nottingham, they were fucking awesome. That is all.
