Left Pen and Stephens at about 9:30 with Lewis, Chubi (our car) and Cumu (our na(wo)man). Cumu almost immediately let the team down by showing that even navwomen have terrible senses of direction (I'm going to make sexist etc jokes in this blog; they are just jokes) and trying to take the whole trip via backroads, but Lewis worked his magic and seduced her into taking us onto the motorway. Arrived and got directed to a carpark and told is was a 15 minute walk to the campsite. 30+ minutes later we arrived at the entrance to the village (a set of food stalls, carnival rides, an open air metal DJ bus and a circus tent of comedy and burlesque shows, and also the gateway to the campsite) only to be told we couldn't bring in gas or glass, so we could either abandon the gas for our little camping stove and our various sauces or hike back to the car and back with our rather heavy bags. Needless to say we abandoned them but the lady let us keep the peanut butter (its in glass jars here, wierd) which was a lifesaver as it, bread and tinned tuna was about all we had left that we could eat. Luckily we had decanted our scotch bottles into a single plastic water bottle for ease of transport or we might have been in trouble.
Another 10 mins walk or so to our campsite where we set up and cracked our first beers. Beers seem to be primarily sold in pint sized (as in a whole pint, not as in the saying that means small) cans which is awesome. Before long a group set up behind us, some poms, a spaniard, a dane and a swede, and we introduced ourselves. They had 2 20L goonsacks of 6% strength cider, which definitely makes up for anything bad I can say about this country. Our other neighbours turned out to be an older stoner couple with crazy tattoos and hair and a young couple who had (so I'm told, I was passed out by then) rather loud sex. The campsite was an enormous sea of coloured tents and people, a large amount of the tents also had flags flying, mostly of various European countries but a lot, presumably the english ones who had no need for their flag, with beer or pot or similar flags, quite a sight. That night we ended up drinking with the group behind us and then wandering up into the village with extra beers to partake in the carnival atmosphere before (I guess, my memory here gets somewhat hazy) going back to our campsite, drinking a bit more and going to sleep.
At this point I am going to say that English metal head crowds are very similar to aussie ones, but somewhat more extreme in appearance, a lot more visible tattoos, brightly coloured and/or hectically styled hair and facial piercings. Apparently there is also a big problem here with youth unemployment rates, I cannot help but wonder if these two things are linking. The crowds also had a tendency, whenever there was a break between bands or a large crowd walking/queueing, to break into empty (mostly) bottle throwing fights or chanting, the most common chants being "backscratcher" yelled from someone then someone else etc, "Spartans, what is your profession?" followed by the crowd all yelling "HOO-AH" or "Ogi ogi ogi, Oi oi oi" which we thought initially was the aussie aussie aussie chant but alas, poms have no taste.
On the friday, the first of the 3 days of live music, we woke up to a lovely, completely unique breakfast of peanut butter sandwiches (we had brought weat bix and long life milk but couldnt refridgerate the milk due to lack of ice and peanut butter on weat bix is the dryest thing in the history of dryest ever things) before walking over to the arena area and seeing D.R.U.G.S. (Destroy, Rebuild Until God Comes) and Anti-Flag, neither of whom I knew but both were really impressive. We then had a brief interlude of more campsite drinking before Bring Me The Horizon, who I didn't expect to like but actually put on a hell of a show, then the big 2 bands of the day for me, KoRn, who played a fantastic, energetic set which included a meddly of a lot of the songs they didn't play properly and turned into Twisted Transistor and then closed with Y'All Want A Single, which blew my mind just a little. After KoRn was Pendulum, who took a very long time setting up a very complex stage setup and seemed like they would be a bit out of place at a metal festival but once they started the crowd, as far back as I could see (and the stage was at the bottom of a hill so you could see all the way to the top), turned into a massive party with an amazing laser and light show as well.
The second day the bands started a couple of hours earlier, and so we were up nice and early to see All That Remains, who I was really keen for having missed them due to a clash with Stone Sour at Soundwave and were excellent, and Rise To Remain, a british band I hadn't heard who were very similar to ATR. We then went back to the campsite for lunch and more drinks, taking a detour via the car as we were running low on alcohol and running out of alcohol would have been terribly un-Australian of us. Then it was back in the evening again and we got there earlier than we needed to, which turned out to be very fortunate as we saw a band called Down, who had half the members of Pantera in, sounded remarkably similar and even played Respect in a dedication to the guy from Pantera who died whos name I can never remember. Then Avenged Sevenfold came out, and of course the crowd turned suddenly into an army of teenagers fight-pitting and throwing bottles but who still managed to surprise me with the quality of show they put on but really were for me just a warm up for the band that was the reason we moved our flights and bought our tickets and were essentially there in the first place: System of a Down. System opened massively and didn't stop for the full, roughly 2 hour set, with Chop Suey of course sending everyone crazy, and finishing big with Toxicity and Sugar. After lunch I had almost fallen asleep but I came out of SOAD suitably fired up and we went back to the campsite with the other group, collected a bunch of drinks and descended on the village, running riot through the fun house before myself and Chris, one of the poms, went off to the metal DJ bus until it closed sometime in the early hours.
We woke up on sunday to pouring rain and freezing cold, the weather having previously been fine, and stayed in the tent (purely because of the weather, nothing at all to do with the late, alcohol laden night we had just had of course) until mid afternoon when we braved the weather to see GWAR, who were as always ridiculous and awesome and ended up fighting a giant robot which sprayed fake blood over the crowd, and Turisas, who were my surprise highlight of the weekend. I knew they would be good but wasn't expected the stage show, crowd even in the cold and wet getting into it so much or the super hot blonde accordian girl. They closed with Rasputin and then Battle Metal and wow, crowd response was amazing. Soaked through and frozen we then pushed ourselves on to the main stage to see Disturbed, who were really good, although the crowd didnt rise to them as much as they would have if the weather had been good. After that though we had reached our limit and went back to the campsite instead of staying around for about 3 hours more to see Bullet For My Valentine (who I have already seen a couple of times) and Linkin Park (who I would have liked to see but I was expecting them to play mostly new stuff, which isn't that great, although we could hear them and they did throw in a few songs I would have loved to have seen). After that we joined Bob, Ali and soon after Chris, in their tent for a long night of drinking and talking, broken only by a brief invasion by a drunk new zealander woman wanting us to help her find fire and a bearded man.
Woke up monday morning to find the rain finally gone, and with it half the campers, although not near half the camp. The enormous fields of tents (70,000 peoples worth) now looked like a huge landfill of mud, piles of rubbish and abandoned tents. Apparently its become commonplace for people to buy cheap tents and mattresses and abandon them afterwards, most of them also either slashing the sides of smashing them in which seems remarkably wasteful and petty. After packing up we walked back with our much lighter packs to the car and drove in towards Derby where Lewis dropped me at my Granny Pat's place before he has now gone on to his own relative tour with the car (I let him take it as I only need to really go to London whereas he has to go all over England). Pat was very much the same as ever, and has a lovely new (well, 10 years old but new to me) dog called Maddie. About an hour later I emerged from the bathroom finally clean and clean shaven, albeit with my chin looking like it was having a heavy flow month as I had never before had to use a non-electric razor and it took some... learning... to get right. I then had a very nice relaxing evening of homecooked hot meal (first in a while), my first real English Ale (Newcastle Brown, very nice) and then we watched a very moving and thought provoking documentary by Sir Terry Pratchett about assisted dieing.
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