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Well, it's roughly 24hrs ago since we took to the stage at this years Download festival and I'm still struggling to find the words to describe how I'm now feeling.
Our day got off in typical Lawnmower deth fashion when at 9:30am I got a call from Chris (Mightymo) to tell me that the van which we had booked to get us all there wasn't available. The Van hire company had us down for Sunday not Saturday... Great !
So as various members of the band and crew started to arrive at my house, a small panic set in.
Stu (ex of Mugtree and Van driver to the Mowers) managed to find a Van hire company in Notts who sorted us out.
Panic over, however we were running a little behind our schedule.
So with wives and girlfriends happily on their way, we loaded up the van and set-off down the motorway.
Nerves at this point were kicking in, some bad smells started to fill the van and it was quite a relief to find that the roads were clear and in no time at all we arrived at Donington.
On arrival we were told we needed to get to something called "band accreditation" so we could get the correct paper work to drive to Stage 3 with the van.
So, off we set to at least 3 different locations all of which were wrong.
Eventually we found the correct porta cabin where we were issued with a piece of paper with a star printed on it. This had mystical powers and we found that once displayed in the van window we were waved through several check points until we reached the back of Stage 3.
Awesome.. we were here and the place was buzzing.
It's been a good few years since I'd been to a festival and the last time I'd been to Donington it was still called "Monsters of Rock"
So I was amazed at how big the whole place looked and how many people there were. Nerves stepped up a little more, but all of us were ready to go.
We were taken to the artists area and given food vouchers and a rider (including a very damaging bottle of JD.. current hangover is the lingering result of this bottle)
We then did a bunch of press interviews which I personally found a bit strange, mainly because there were a bunch of women walking around the place in PVC knickers and not a lot else. I mean, who cares about the merits of the message in Icky Ficky when there's that kind of distraction around ?
Once all that was done, it was around 4pm and our minds started to process the scale of what was to come.
We'd been in and out of Stage 3 throughout the day and it always had a healthy amount of people in there.
I suspected that it would be empty by the time we came on as Pendulum and five finger death punch were on at the same time as us.
We were wrong !
Man Raze took to the stage and we started getting our gear together behind the stage.
Kev appeared dressed as a clown, Flymo started bolting drums together, Chris lost his Oakleys, Paddy made beeping noises, Pete blew up footballs and I kept running to the bog and back.
Man Raze finished.. IT WAS NOW OUR TURN !
As we don't have a crew to set our gear up we all started taking amps onto the stage, and I remember looking out into the tent to see a lot of people staring back at me.
Some familiar faces were already down the front, but more pleasing was the amount of people I could see heading our way.
This is when it really hit.
This was going to be busy after all :)
A very brief line check completed and we were ready. Kev by this point was fit to burst, not much sense was being made, but we were all tense.
Intro suddenly fired into life and we were off.
Mightymo led the way and the roar from the crowd as we all followed was unreal, what an adrenaline rush!
Kev went straight to the front of the stage and whilst we let our 1st chord of the evening ring the 1st of many guitars bit the dust as it was deftly swung to its doom.
Then we were off... Spook Perv quickly followed by Jaggered wedge, a mosh pit broke out, more people seemed to fill the tent and beyond.
Mexican waves, Snails, Flying killer cobs (well cheap seaside footballs) thrown into the crowd.
I could even see people outside the tent doing the mexican wave... this was unreal
We were playing the best we have in years (a few missed chords here and there, but we were tight!)
Kev then did his rendition of the Jungle book on his pink ukulele, everyone seemed to join in with the singing.. Non of us could stop grinning, this was fast becoming one of the most amazing experiences that I've had.
Icky Ficky, everyone joined in again and we even got a large section of the crowd to do the fishdance;
Sheepdip, arms were waving all across the tent.
Then all too soon, our time was up. We had just enough time to do our final song of the evening.
Pete got everyone to count to 20... 16, 17, 18, 19, 20... crash... 3 more guitars met their ends to the song "Fuck Off"
I've always wanted to do that and many thanks to Kev for being stupid enought to go out and buy a load of guitars to kill (although one lucky member of the front row got one given to him intact, I hope he had some fun with that !)
That's it.. show over and what a reception we got.
On behalf of all of us, I want to thank each and everyone of you who came to see us. We really didn't expect a response like that and it's pretty humbling that after all these years you all came along and had some fun with us.
I still haven't come back down to earth, I suspect I'll be like this for a few days yet.
So if any of you have and photo's or video footage of the gig, we'd love to see it.
Get posting them on youtube or your myspace pages. I'll try and add links as I find them.
Once again.. Thanks for making it such a special event for us.
Who knows.. we may well be back next year for more ;)
And finally, A massive thank you goes to Andy Copping and the rest of the Download team for being mad enough to put us on in the 1st place.
Sir, you are a legend and we hope to be able to buy you many beers some day in the future.
Cheers
Steve
15:07
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