Metal chose tactical retreat. It withdrew to Donington Park, which became an instant Metal refuge. To this day, it remains the only annual festival in the world to have represented just the one style of music. No deviation, variation or contamination; you came to get Metal and you got it in spades. They called it the Monsters of Rock festival, quite correctly. The first one went like this:
August 1980. A killer line-up is waiting to perform and it’s pissing down with rain. Things kick off at around lunchtime with Touch, an American bunch of pansies actually, hardly the kind of band to be inaugurating the gleaming Donington boards. This inauspicious appearance was capped in style by Touch vocalist Doug Howard who accidentally swallowed a bee onstage while drinking a glass of water. They split soon after.
Next up were Riot, another American band that, despite never being successful, were still going strong well into the 90s. Nothing in their performance that day stands out for me to mention. (I am aware that I said it was a killer line-up. Hold on.)
Then, Saxon.
Saxon rocked the motherfucking stage to pieces. They virtually blew the goddamn thing off its foundations. Well, not quite, they didn’t have to; that had been done the night before, when roadies set off too much pyro on one side of the stage, and literally blew up the PA system. The damage totalled £18,000 but they fixed it up for the next day just in time.
Saxon (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) were from Yorkshire and were originally called Son of a Bitch. Their vocalist, Biff Byford, was somewhat larger than life, and an early pioneer of Spandex, and of that bulge in particular. Their second album, Wheels of Steel, was riding high in the charts, which brought the lads to the stage full of cocky rock-star abandon. Some said their relatively lowly place on the bill that day was an insult to their chart success. Some disagreed. Thankfully everyone agreed that Saxon were on storming form that afternoon. And they were back again two years later, this time third on the bill behind headliners Status Quo and Gillan, to fulfil their Donington potential once and for all. I had a brief fling with Saxon myself, around the time of their The Power and the Glory album, but never got beyond that average piece of work because, to me, Biff’s voice sounded fatty, like chips, and most of their songs were too predictable anyway.
After Saxon’s blistering performance, the day’s bar had been raised. Next up were April Wine, an unremarkable Canadian group that had been going all through the 70s. The crowd applauded tracks from their recent platter, Harder … Faster!
So far, so Saxon then, really. But hang on, what’s that noise? It sounds pretty good, it sounds ruthless, it sounds well-organised. Could it be the mighty Scorps?
Yes, it was.
The Scorpions, one of Heavy Metal’s Great Perennial Bands, were formed in Hanover in 1965. Child prodigies Klaus Meine, Rudolph Schenker and his young axe-hero brother Michael, gathered some years later, in 1971, to record their début album, Lonesome Crow, which sounded like some sort of echo-prog Jimi Hendrix with hysterical operatic vocals over the top. It went on for hours. I took mine back to the shop, despite its cool-as-fuck clear vinyl.
These early feminine swirls in the ether were soon anchored to a more turgid beat when Michael left the group (for the first time). With Virgin Killer and Taken by Force it was clear that the Scorps were slowly getting the hang of what Metal albums were supposed to be called. Soon though, after a cracking double live album recorded in Japan called Tokyo Tapes, Michael’s replacement, the comedy hippy-looking Uli-Jon Roth, left the Scorps to be replaced by Michael again, whose legendary ego was suspected to already be causing havoc with every decision he made. (This rather exhausting state of affairs would continue for the rest of his career. Even his eponymous band, the Michael Schenker Group, weren’t exempt from his whims.) Michael left again soon after to be replaced by Matthias Jabs, another German Spandex god, who, despite a brief reappearance from Michael a year later, has remained with the boys ever since.
With Jabs on board they became one of the biggest and best Metal bands in the world. Lovedrive, Animal Magnetism, Blackout, Love at First Sting; each sold more than the last, and they cruised to their peak after their second double-live set, the clear-as-day World Wide Live in 1985. Was this their eternal sunset? Was this the crest of the Scorpion wave? No it wasn’t, though it ought to have been.
1989: Ecstasy; raving; The Stone Roses; Gorbachev; the fall of the Berlin Wall … and Klaus Meine, rapidly balding, jet-throated Scorps vocalist, singing (and whistling) ‘Wind of Change’, a moving paean to the forces of progress. It was a worldwide sensation, going to number one in eleven countries (UK excepted). In the perestroika spirit of the time, they also recorded a version of the song in Russian, and it hit the top spot there too. All over the world, billions of people watched the symbolic collapse of the Eastern Bloc, soundtracked by the Scorpions. They played vast stadium concerts in celebration. Even if you didn’t smoke, you’d bring a lighter along to the show, just to hold it in the air and sway and burn your thumb along with ‘Wind of Change’. The German government gave them a medal.
Back at Donington in 1980, the Scorpions arrived onstage having just released their excellent Lovedrive album. They were the band of the day – they kicked some serious axe ass, and the first ever Donington crowd loved them and their twin Flying ‘V’ attack and all Klaus’s impassioned shrieking. An hour later, and the Scorps had triumphed again.
I used to love the Scorpions. Klaus Meine’s strange German accent sent exotic shivers down my spine and I bought all their records and loved every one. Their Metal was the sound of fitness: hard, lean, not too long, simple rock melodies, raunchy sex lyrics and striped Spandex hugging every sweaty and brilliantly choreographed stage pose. True professionals the lot, except wimpy bassist Francis Bucholz, who I didn’t like because he looked like one of my teachers at school.
Next up were the penultimate band of the day, the mighty Judas Priest. Here were the boys fresh from their classic British Steel album, and firing on every last Black Country cylinder. Rob Halford made his trademark entrance with sunglasses, leather cap and riding a great big Harley Davidson motorbike. The rest of the band, studded up to their necks in leather, delivered the goods behind him as day gradually turned to night.
It had been a hell of a bill, but there was still more to come. The evening drew to a close with a triumphant set from headliners Rainbow, featuring Ritchie Blackmore again, and then, after a brief, rain-sodden firework display, the first Monsters of Rock was over.
Of the 15 times the festival has taken place, Metallica have appeared the most. They played it four times, eventually topping the bill in 1995. Iron Maiden can also claim a rarefied position in that whenever they’ve been there they’ve headlined. They were also the loudest – in 1988 – which was probably the mutha of all Doningtons. This was the year with the biggest ever crowd (over 100,000), and the one with the most rain – a Donington certainty. It was also notable for something else.
In 1988 two young men were crushed to death after a crowd surge during Guns n’ Roses’ performance. Had the band been further up the bill, this might not have happened (they were second bottom on the bill that year – they’d grown a lot since being booked). Should the authorities have made provision for the group’s new-found popularity and predicted the crowd’s response? Or should we just be thankful that it was only two young lives wasted, as opposed to the nine killed in the Roskilde Festival in Denmark in 1997 while Pearl Jam were playing? These two young men went for a brilliant day out in the rain and mud to watch their favourite bands, and never came back.
The Metal world was horrified by the deaths; it was the worst thing ever to happen to the festival, or to Metal in this country as a whole.
The festival was cancelled the following year. It was back in 1990, allegedly much safer. There were other attempts; if not to shut down the thing altogether, then certainly to curb the ‘unwarranted’ tendencies of, shall we call them, the sociological cutting edge of Metal’s more extreme protagonists.