‘We are the great unwashed!’: Iron Maiden, Metallica and more on 20 years of Download

The mega metal weekender celebrates its anniversary this year. In an oral history its stars, punters and long-suffering crew remember Spitfire fly-bys, urine-filled bottles and a lot of mud

As AC/DC said, "It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock’n’roll". Ask any of the 100,000-odd people embarking on their annual pilgrimage to the spiritual home of metal, and they’ll jokingly tell you the road to Donington Park doesn't feel much shorter. Born from the ashes of the Monsters of Rock one-dayers, recalibrated for rock's burgeoning new generation and christened with a suitably edgy name that would most definitely never age badly, the Download festival has, since 2003, established itself as the beating heart of a scene with the volume turned up to 11. With the festival this weekend marking its 20th anniversary with its biggest event yet, the story of its rise is one of community, circle pits and an inordinate amount of urine in bottles …

Stuart Galbraith ( founder of Download & CEO of promoters Kilimanjaro Live ) In the early 2000s, there were whole new genres of rock coming through. I felt we needed something that was able to embrace that, as well as still cover heritage artists.

John Probyn ( festival director, Live Nation ) The only real growth areas at the time were dance music and rock. If you looked at rock's old guard, they were all still selling a lot of tickets. And then there was a huge up-and-coming market of younger bands as well.

Galbraith Monsters of Rock started at Donington because the Midlands was such a hotbed for rock. That still held true for Download. We did briefly consider Milton Keynes, but they couldn't accommodate what we needed for camping.

Andy Copping (head booker & Live Nation's president of UK touring ) Donington is the Stonehenge of rock music. It has a living, breathing heart. You could stand there any random weekend and feel something. Download couldn't not be there.

Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden frontman ) I wouldn't describe Donington as a magical place … What makes Donington magical is the people that go there. We are the great unwashed, who have been pushed away from areas of civilisation where normal, genteel people like to go and sip their lattes, and we’ve been sent out to this field in between a motor racing track and the approach lights of East Midlands airport.

Probyn Donington is firstly designed for people to watch cars and motorbikes whiz round at 100mph. You suddenly try to put a rock festival in there – and build it while the track is still operational – and it wasn't easy. It was a bloody nightmare, in fact, and still is sometimes.

Copping Any festival promoter will tell you the same thing: no band wants to do year one, because if it's a failure, they don't want to be attached to it. We had a list of names we wanted, and we just went fishing.

Galbraith Getting the bill together for the first year, it fell into place two or three days before we finally announced.

Copping Limp Bizkit, who were booked to headline [alongside Iron Maiden], pulled out five weeks before the festival. There was no opportunity to find a replacement. It has to be the most horrific thing that can happen in terms of booking.

Galbraith It was discussed a couple of weeks beforehand that Metallica wanted to play, but we didn't have any budget left. So the idea of them doing a secret set [on the small second stage] was born. It took a huge amount of planning to keep it quiet so it was safe for the audience and the band.

Kirk Hammett (Metallica guitarist) I don't like full "chaos", but I’m a sucker for "pandemonium" – I get a weird amusement out of it! We tried to keep it as secret as possible, and we did a really, really good job up until about 45 minutes before. We covered all logos on our kit and everything, and you know what the one thing that gave us away was? People recognised our crew and our techs! We hit the stage and it was an explosion of energy. We still talk about that show now.

Copping The numbers [in the first year] weren't catastrophic; they weren't through the roof, either. But we got through it, and I remember being on site and thinking: "We’ve got something here."

Probyn All the way through [planning], I had kept saying: "We’ve got to think of the audience. It's going to be 30-, 40-, 50-year-old blokes in denim jackets with patches. And then when we opened the doors on the first day, they were all kids, 16 and 17 years old. I was like: "I’ve got this completely wrong."

Copping Metallica were booked to headline the following year. About 3pm on the day they were due to play, I got a message across the radio to urgently head back to the production area.

Galbraith We all got together and the band told us Lars [Ulrich, Metallica co-founder and drummer] isn't here, and he's not coming.

Copping I thought we were cursed. The band said they wanted to try to make something work with guest drummers. But, honestly, I told them they should just cancel.

Galbraith They handed me a list of drummers and asked if we could track these people down and bring them to their dressing room.

Dave Lombardo ( ex-Slayer drummer ) I was backstage and Slayer's manager hit me up and said: "Lars isn't making the show." They told me he was OK but needed to go to the hospital, so I said: "I’d love to help out." I was given a little CD player to listen to the songs to reacquaint myself. Luckily, they also had Joey Jordison from Slipknot, who I heard had played in a Metallica covers band when he was younger.

Hammett When stuff like this happens, I don't know why but the responsibility seems to land on me [laughs]. I couldn't do anything for the next three hours except talk to drummers. I remember seeing Dimebag [Darrell, former Pantera guitarist] wave at me from a distance backstage; I looked at him and mouthed: ‘We are completely fucked.’ He came over laughing and just said: ‘You guys have got this.’ And that was the last time I saw Dime [before his death that December]. I still regret not taking the time to have a full conversation with him."

Copping We set the band, Dave and Joey up in a [portable building] for them to rehearse. Eventually, they came out and told us they had about an hour's worth of material.

Hammett Joey could play all sorts of things; I remember saying to him: "Bro, you’re gonna have to play a bunch of these tunes tonight … " He was beside himself, he was so happy. At the end of the set, I turned to Joey onstage, and I asked him if he could play Enter Sandman. And I saw through his mask [Jordison was still in his Slipknot stage attire] that he had tears in both of his eyes. He was crying because it meant so much for him to be playing Sandman with us at Download. I’ll never forget that.

Galbraith That whole situation was very traumatic at the time. Then a couple of years later [2006], we had Guns N’ Roses. And with all things Guns N’ Roses, there's always drama …

Copping The expectation was so high, and the crowd was really fired up. But Axl [Rose] kept slipping, the vibe on stage was awful, there were sound issues. The crowd started throwing things and the [then] bassist, Tommy Stinson, said: "That's it, I’m going."

Galbraith We met him on the stairs down from the stage and had to talk him into staying: "Look, if you leave, 80,000 people will go mad. There’ll be chaos. People will get hurt. Please, please do the show." Thankfully, he did.

Copping A big part of our MO from the outset was that we wanted Download to be a festival for the fans. We wanted them to feel included and to have a voice. Its messageboards were a huge part of that.

Galbraith Download really grew as a community from all of the online interaction it had before people even came on site.

Carrie Simpson (Download message board admin) You could go on [the messageboards] at any time, day or night, and there would be people there. At the height of it we had 50,000 people registered. You could find people to talk about anything.

Probyn It became an amazing market research tool for us. I always would say to them: "This festival will be as good as you all make it." The first year, a young goth girl came up to me, gave me a huge hug and said: "This is the only weekend of the year I can be myself and not be judged. Thank you."

Galbraith We very quickly put together a "fan forum" focus group in a pub. We asked: "What do you want? What do you need? What do you like?" We just had to watch, listen and work out what it was we needed to provide.

Phil Hull (Download message board admin) For fans to be meeting the people behind the festival to tell them what they thought, I think it was quite radical, really.

Simpson We opened their eyes to a lot of issues. We did a huge amount of work to help cater for disabled people, families, people with anxiety, and people coming to the festival on their own. The idea that security would all be numbered so they were identifiable came from those forums, too, and that is now universal.

Hull It would have been easy [for the organisers] to do all of this as just some PR exercise, but they engaged. It gave people ownership of the festival.

Simpson Of course, everyone liked to moan about the lineups … We used to joke and give Andy [Copping] a construction hard hat when the topic came up. In 2007, My Chemical Romance were announced to headline and people went ballistic. There were petitions, people writing to the BBC: "Save our Download!"

Copping I remember saying to My Chemical Romance [before they went on stage]: "Whatever happens out there, whatever they throw at you, just don't stop."

Chester Bennington (Linkin Park frontman , speaking in 2014) The first time we were gonna play Download [in 2004], we were told: "If [the crowd] don't like you, they throw fucking piss at you. Everyone carries piss around and then they throw it at people."

Matt Heafy (Trivium singer-guitarist ) Right before our set in 2006, I was at the back of the stage and this bottle flew over the backdrop, hit me and covered me in liquid … I was covered in piss the entire second time we played Download.

Rou Reynolds (Enter Shikari vocalist-keyboardist) I remember playing in 2007, just before Korn. I went to the barrier and this group of Korn fans were there, absolutely raging, and one of them kept punching me! The animosity between genres in the scene back then was quite something.

Copping When we first booked Slipknot to headline in 2009, people said I was mental. But now Slipknot are a bona fide headliner, and that show is talked about as being the greatest set ever.

Shawn ‘Clown ’ Crahan (Slipknot percussionist ) There are those shows where there's a vibe, an energy source surrounding you, that forces you to acknowledge where you’re at. "This is career defining. This is my soul being remoulded here." These are the things you’ve dreamed of.

Copping That was the year that the festival really came of age. It was the first time I thought: "People are really accepting the variety of this festival now." You had someone wearing a Whitesnake T-shirt watching Korn, and someone in a Limp Bizkit T-shirt watching Def Leppard.

Joe Elliott (Def Leppard frontman ) I think it wasn't until after the show that we realised what we were putting ourselves up to do. The broadening of the audience at Download has been nothing but a brilliant thing. It breaks down a lot of barriers.

Probyn The biggest challenge for me came in 2010, when we had AC/DC headlining. I had a call with their production manager who told me: "John, the band want every single thing that is on their stage [for their headline tour] to be at Download." And their production had a train on stage. So we told them to bring their own stage that only they could use, and we built it directly next to our main stage.

Copping It was probably the most stressful time that I’ve ever been through. I still get flashbacks of it.

Robb Flynn (Machine Head singer-guitarist) In 2012, we set the record for most circle pits – 29 consecutive circle pits! It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Lzzy Hale (Halestorm singer-guitarist) I remember being on stage that year and looking out at the crowd. It was just mud people. You couldn't tell who was a boy, who was a girl, who was old or who was young. There was no race, no gender, there was only … mud.

Myles Kennedy (Alter Bridge ) Of the 10 times I’ve played Download, most of those have involved rain! What blows my mind is the fact that people will stand out and withstand the elements for the sake of rock’n’roll. That's really inspiring. They’re not fair-weather fans … literally!

Dickinson In recent years, we’ve had a replica Spitfire on stage for the song Aces High, but for the occasion of us headlining Download in 2013, we actually had a real one – a Battle of Britain memorial flight Spitfire. We phoned up [the RAF] and said: "I know you do displays … any chance you could do one for us?" So at the beginning of the show, the Spitfire flew over and did a couple of circles round the stage. In typical fashion, the RAF were precise to the second, so as it headed off, back over the top of the stage, we started our intro tape. It completely stunned the crowd.

Hale Download is unique in that it doesn't eat its young. If you are a part of it, you’re part of it for life.

Courtney LaPlante (Spiritbox ) I watch videos of our [first Download performance, in 2022], and it's a very out-of-body experience. That show taught me a huge lesson: the crowd don't care if you’re perfect. These are your people, they’re having the best weekend of their lives, and you just need to enjoy it as much as they are. And, honestly, Download was one of the best experiences of our lives.

Copping The festival's heart and its soul are still the same, but it's evolved. We’re trying to put on the best event for the broad church of rock fans. How we see Download today I think will be very different in five or 10 years.

Hale When we were there in 2019, it was really wonderful to see so many female-led acts, and all of the women that are working backstage. I feel such a sense of pride [at becoming the first female-led band to headline one of the festival's two biggest stages, in 2019]. But it is also a little disheartening.

Copping You do have to take on the criticism of where the female representation [at the top of the festival's lineups] has been. Thankfully, the scene as a whole is changing.

Heafy Download has an X-factor that the other festivals just don't. If the stars align just correctly, it can change the trajectory of your future.

Elliott To a rock fan, Download is your Glastonbury. It's not just about the music. It's a rite of passage.

Probyn Someone who used to work for me would say: "You don't do Download, Download does you." Because when you’ve done it once, you never want to not do it.

Download: The Official History will be available from Rufus Publications later this year. Metallica's 72 Seasons is out now via Blackened.

This article was amended on 9 June 2023 to reflect John Probyn's current role at Live Nation