Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I by Paul Brannigan & Ian Winwood

Author:Paul Brannigan & Ian Winwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Music, Arts & Photography, Musical Genres, Heavy Metal
ISBN: 9780571294169
Publisher: Faber & Faber Rock Music
Published: 2013-10-29T13:00:00+00:00

As gratifying as all this must have been for Metallica, without question, their two most significant live appearances of the year took place in the warmer months of 1985. The first of these saw the band fly once more to England in order to honour a booking on the bill at the Monsters of Rock festival held at Donington Park, a motor racing circuit just outside Nottingham in the East Midlands. The brainchild of promoters Paul Loasby and Maurice Jones, the then annual, then day-long, event had been born in 1980 as an outdoor concert, the line-up for which had been designed to appeal solely to fans of hard rock and heavy metal. The first Monsters of Rock bill was headlined by Rainbow, atop a docket that also featured Scorpions and Saxon. Other groups that appeared at the muddiest festival site of the English summer in the early to mid-Eighties included AC/DC, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Whitesnake and Twisted Sister.

With a line-up of headliners ZZ Top, English progressive rock quintet Marillion, Ratt, Bon Jovi, Metallica, and Brummie pub rock footnotes Magnum as the day’s opening act, the roster for the 1985 Monsters of Rock festival remains the most muddled bill of the festival’s first decade of existence. Despite the world-class quality of the headline act – a group which featured the talents of one Billy F. Gibbons, a player once described by no less an authority than Jimi Hendrix as being the finest guitarist of his generation – too often the 55,000 people gathered on the uneven ground within the inside corners of a concrete racetrack on Saturday August 17, 1985, were subjected to music that tended towards the ponderous and mediocre, lightweight in its tonality and occasionally plain inane. Among this number, Metallica stood out like a severed thumb. The group may have had just nine songs and less than an hour to make their point, but in front of the largest crowd they had yet faced the San Franciscans proved they were fast becoming masters of a first impression of a form both defiant and unyielding.

‘If you came here to see spandex, eye make-up, and the words “Oh baby” in every fucking song, this ain’t the fucking band,’ announced Hetfield to those in attendance. ‘Forget that Spandex shit, we came here to bang some heads for fifty-five minutes.’ The front man then added that if the audience planned ‘to throw shit up here, just make sure that you don’t hit our beer – that’s our fuel!’

More than a generation removed from the Monster of Rock festivals of the Eighties, it is difficult to re-create in words the kind of sight that met the eye at Donington Park. Suffice to say, it was no place for the faint of heart. Before the racetrack’s gates had even opened to the public, the roads leading to the site would be strewn with the bodies of young men already drunk to the point of unconsciousness. Whereas festivals in the twenty-first

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