Day One

Let’s get the negatives out of the way first. The weather sucked. 

“IT’S F***ING JUNE!” a friend — down from Scotland, no less — roared into the wind as a brief hailstorm interrupted BABYMETAL’s set on Saturday afternoon. However, if you’re going to listen to musical styles with history rooted in the English midlands, you need to make peace with the rain.

It’s surprising how quickly you get over it, too. After recovering from the open-wallet surgery practised by the festival’s enterprising poncho salesmen, and perfecting the technique of aquaplaning across the mud, you realise you’re having a pretty good time. 

The savvy festivalgoer got ponchoed up in good time for Black Stone Cherry on Friday evening. Their set was long on deep south whimsy — I think we were all personally invited to the bayou at one point — but light on my wife’s favourite song, Stay, which I’m told ruined the whole thing.

Queens of the Stone Age stole the show on Friday night, though. Josh Homme has broken his vow of sobriety, and some, but being “stoned and fucked up” didn’t detract one bit from his performance. You knew they were serious when they opened with Little Sister, and Go With The Flow slapped particularly hard. I left their set with the niggling worry that nothing else over the weekend, on paper, looked set to top it.

Day Two

By Saturday morning, the arena was covered in the kind of viscous, sludgy mud that spontaneously appears during the T-rex attack in Jurassic Park.

Talking of dinosaurs, The Offspring were there. It seems harsh to single them out when the whole lineup is, in some respect, an homage to 90s/00s pop punk, but there’s something jarring about a band whose youthfulness was once their entire persona still goofing about in their 50s. 

This was exacerbated by some pretty shaky audience banter — essentially a skit that revolved around over-exaggerating the size and energy of the crowd. It was obviously a bit of fun, but when your comedy culture isn’t as steeped in sarcasm as the UK’s, it’s hard to realise how this will come across to 100,000 sodden Brits. 

The music, though, is as you’d expect; lots of fun, and the setlist littered with crowdpleasers. 

However, Fall Out Boy, once again, proved that the good folk at Download had got their headline slots right. They put on a theatrical tour de force which started with Patrick Stump in a backstage hospital scene and finished with Pete Wentz being hoisted into the air by a set of balloons. Along the way, Wentz also emerged from a pyramid spitting fire out of the end of his bass for The Phoenix and My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark, as you do.

Song of the set, pyrotechnics notwithstanding, goes to Love From the Other Side, but the entire show glittered with musicality as they went through their albums in chronological order. Hey, maybe the end of QOTSA wasn’t the end of the world, after all.

Day Three

And the Metal Gods did smile down upon them; and the rain did stop; and, lo, there was sunlight; and the goths did shudder mightily.

Suddenly, there was sunshine — loads of it, everywhere. Far too late in the day to do anything about the mud, but by this point nobody cared.

With the weather upended, the music went down under with an early set from New Zealand metal act Alien Weaponry on the Opus stage. With several songs written in Te Reo Maori, theirs was a perfect act to get the crowd going in the early afternoon sunshine. Cue bright green smoke canisters in the mosh pit.

From there, the middle stage of Sunday was a pop punk throwback. Bowling for Soup nailed their set, not least because their audience patter actually landed, followed by Sum41 serving up a glorious final bow on their UK touring days. Hits from their second album, ‘Does This Look Infected’, like The Hell Song, Over My Head and the finale, Still Waiting, struck particularly meaty chords.

Getting the arena safe for the crowds given all the mud had significantly delayed its opening time, and a knock-on effect was a shuffling of the schedule which led to a particularly grim state of affairs. Corey Taylor, who had been unwell all week and cancelled several other European shows in order to be fit for Download, was on at the same time as Limp Bizkit. 

By all accounts, those who chose to see him were richly rewarded, which is good. I wouldn’t change my choice, though. Limp Bizkit were arguably the highlight; they opened and closed with Break Stuff — Fred Durst’s invitation to “party like it’s 1999” setting off alarm bells for those of us who have seen Trainwreck. 

Throughout, it was all good vibes though. Durst was having the time of his life, embracing British festival culture by swapping the red cap for a blue bucket hat.

By the time Avenged Sevenfold started, I’d had my fill (especially of Four Loko). Their set got off to a promising start, especially with the anthemic Afterlife and Hail to the King popping up early on, but sadly, technical issues took the wind out of their sails. Not through their own fault, but this was probably the weakest of the three headline sets. 

No regrets, though. Through the mud and the rain, Download 2024 was a splash. 

Check out the Humans of Download here and get tickets for the 2025 edition here.