Download Festival’s Melvin Benn on confirming Latitude: ‘We’re going to get the summer back’
Headlining the second stage of the Download Pilot festival, Frank Turner has a question for the 3000 standing in front of him. As his backing band The Sleeping Souls begin breaking down the rousing and perfectly poignant hit single I Still Believe, the singer asks, “Now who’d have thought that after all something as simple as rock’n’roll would save us all?”
At the end of three days in the field at Donington Park, it seems as if 10,000 people feel exactly the same way. The first government sanctioned festival of a summer season that will live or die by what happens on July 19, for one weekend only the history-making crowd – each attendee has tested negative for Covid-19 – is free of the obligations that have besmirched everyday life for the past 15 months. Here there is no social distancing. There are no face masks. There is only freedom.
Combined with a roster of loud bands – Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, Enter Shikari and Bullet For My Valentine are the mainstage headliners, with dozens of acts on the undercard – it’s quite the heady brew. With the sun breaking through heavy clouds, people mosh in fancy dress. They stand headbanging at the silent disco at one o’ clock in the morning. Packed together at the barriers, they give long ovations to bands whose rustiness can be heard from a continent away. Amid the drunken thrill of it all, it can almost seem as if the return of live music covers every sin.
“When I first turned up, I was wearing my mask everywhere but I noticed that no one else was,” says Will Gould, the singer with Saturday night second stage headliners Creeper. “So I asked the staff what was going on, and they told me that I didn’t have to wear one if I didn’t want to. I was, like, ‘That is wild!’ Looking around here, it’s so weird. You’re seeing the return of the human spirit. What we’re doing was once normal, but it’s not normal right now. It’s like a distant memory that I’m stepping back into.”
It takes everyone a while to re-learn the ropes. Barely a tenth of its usual size, the crowd at Download ranges from 16 (the minimum age for entry) to senior citizens who may well have been here in 1980 when Judas Priest and Rainbow headlined the first rock festival staged on this site. After 15 months spent watching bands on laptops, at first it seems strange to remember that performers like, and deserve, to be rewarded with cheers and applause. The crowd-surfing and moshing doesn’t re-appear widely until the twilight hours of Friday night.
But for all the energy and commotion that is eventually expended on the weekend’s 40 bands, the vibe at Donington Park is of kindness and community. Every performer is given a fair and patient hearing, up to and including those who don’t deserve it. Two hours after the band’s singer, Ginger Wildheart, told me that “we always excel at festivals when we haven’t got a clue what to expect,” on Sunday afternoon the always combustible The Wildhearts quit the stage after five songs due to sound problems. “This is f__ s__,” says their frontman to a crowd that is no more than disappointed by this one exception to the convivial mood.
But as enjoyable as Download may be, the real purpose of this weekend is to provide the data that will allow larger and more profitable gatherings to follow. Until this happens, the key players at Donington Park are in the red. The musicians are being paid only their expenses, while organisers Festival Republic confirm that they are taking a heavy loss over three days (they decline to reveal the exact figure). Pulling together as one, Download 2021 is an exercise in good faith from an industry desperate for a break.
“I’m losing money being here,” Frank Turner tells me. “It costs money getting a band up and running again after 15-months of not playing together. We have to get all our equipment checked out, we have to rehearse for a week; and that would be fine if this was a run of a week of shows, or two weeks of shows. Because that’s what I thought it would be. We had shows booked for tomorrow [June 21st] that have been cancelled. It became clear before we announced them that we would have to cancel them.”
This is the quandary the musicians at Download are facing. Rather than the expected coming out party for a community that has suffered more than most, the deferral of the restoration of full freedom until July 19 means the bands and their crews have been given a day’s work without pay before heading once more into a further month’s hibernation.
“People are saying, ‘Well what difference does four weeks make?’” Turner says. “Well, that depends who you are…. If you’re the kind of person who can’t see that there’s a problem with culture in this [new] world at the moment, that makes you uncultured.
“As an industry, we have to participate in the conversation,” he says. “If we turned around and said we’re not going to participate in these [pilot schemes] because everyone will lose money, the government would quite happily say, ‘Well we offered and you said no’. And that would be the end of the conversation. We have to demonstrate a willingness to try, and to experiment and to play along, because otherwise live music is dead.”
Out in the field, it doesn’t take long to uncover genuine relief at the return of this temporary normality. Frying up a brisk trade, the women at the donut stall haven’t had a weekend’s work in almost nine months. “It feels like it’s been a very long winter,” one of them says. Out near the campsite, the kindly man running the second-hand clothes stall tells me that he would have been rendered homeless were it not for a friend who allowed him to live in his house rent free.
Even the bands at the top of the bill are in a state. Eleven years after AC/DC were paid four million quid to headline Download, to make ends meet in 2021 Frank Carter was required to sell every piece of
memorabilia he’d amassed over the course of a 15-year career. Test pressings, demo tapes and promotional items were packed into 50 boxes and flogged to members of the public. His life’s work fetched ￡15,000.
“It’s been a struggle, and that’s a diplomatic way of describing the situation,” Carter tells me. “This is not the answer that I wanted to talk about, but I got to the point where I didn’t know what to do.
At the start of January, Saturday night’s headliners Enter Shikari called a meeting at which they plotted prospective live dates for 2020. The later in the year the concerts took place, the more trouble the band were in. “We said, ‘If we don’t tour by this [certain] date then we’re kind of f__,” singer Rou Reynolds tells me. “It’s the shows that allow a band to survive. So the more delays there are, the more f__-ups there are from the government, the worse and worse it becomes.”
More than anything else, this is the vibe of Download 2021. What can we do, and when can we do it? Backstage, bands delighted by the opportunity to at last play live are filled with quiet panic about what the future might hold. To my surprise, the most reassuring interviewee is Melvin Benn, the managing director of Festival Republic. An influential figure in close communication with Her Majesty’s Government, Benn is no doubt at what will happen come July 19th.
“I’m very confident we’ll get back to something like normality this summer,” he says. “I think that Boris will open us up on the 19 July. I’m very confident about that. I put [an announcement] out yesterday about Latitude festival [in Suffolk]. I’ve announced more acts for Latitude… That’s on the 22-23 of July, which is of course only a few days after July 19. And I did that because of my confidence in what’s going to happen. The bands there won’t be playing for free. There’ll be full-price tickets and everyone being paid properly. From July 19, we’re going to get the summer back.”
With the clouds finally clearing, on Sunday evening at Donington Park, it’s tempting to fall prey to this kind of optimism. As the crowd waits for the arrival of Bullet For My Valentine, the big screens on the side of the main stage flash advertisements for tours booked to take place in the autumn. From large arenas to modest club, the social calendar is full. If the dates are honoured, the sector will once again be back in business. If they’re cancelled or postponed, everything hangs by a thread.
“At the moment I’d say that the live music industry can recover from [all of] this,” says Frank Turner. “But one of the things I’ve found most frustrating is… that there’s been whispers about whether or not we’ll see the return of normal shows this year. And if that’s the case then the live music industry is dead. Speaking personally, my nest egg, my safety net, is f___ gone. And if this summer turns out to be like last summer then [it’s] f___ If we have a brief flowering followed by a further series of lockdowns, then that’s a disaster for everyone.”
