The history of Bloodstock

Bloodstock Open Air 2017

Whoa! Slap us on the butt and call us Mary, that was a festival and a half. If you were round our place between August 10 and 13, you saw an entire planet’s worth of metal all in a single location – the beautiful Catton Hall. Packed with loyal headbangers and awash with the finest intoxicating liquors available to man, woman or goat, BOA 2017 smashed it out of the park yet again!

Want some highlights? Well, if it was technical wizardry you were after on the Saturday – and why wouldn’t you be? – you needed to look no further than Fallujah for a nice brutal early-morning wake-up call. Then there was the great Winterfylleth, playing the Main Stage this year, having blown our minds beforehand on the Sophie Lancaster Stage. More devilish than a night on the vindaloo with Satan himself, the ’Fylleth gave us a demonic performance that rocked the entire fest.

Who likes Brit-thrash? We do! Eradikator ripped the Sophie Lancaster stage a new orifice this weekend, even dedicating a new song to Sophie herself. As for the American stuff, modern thrashers Havok brought the noise in fine style, leading the legions in a mighty bangalong that warmed our hearts, while doom fans were treated to an unfeasibly heavy riff workout courtesy of Kroh.

Commitment was the unofficial theme of this year’s BOA, running through our veins like molten lava. Take King 810, for instance, who enjoyed a brush with the local constabulary back home in the US of A before flying over to play with us this weekend, meaning that their guitarist Andrew Beal was unable to make the show, but like the troopers they are, they still delivered the goods on the Ronnie James Dio stage. 

Here’s a buzz word for you... Hatebreed! If there’s a nicer metal dude than Jamey Jasta we’ve yet to meet him, and his band were on fire this weekend, levelling the Ronnie James Dio Stage crowd with total commitment. And there was the One Hundred, who stamped their presence on the Sophie stage audience, while if anyone was in doubt about the nature of Abhorrent Decimation’s music (it’s death metal, who woulda thunk it?) they were soon relieved of all uncertainty by the epically violent nature of AD’s set.

Was it new bands you were looking for? The Hobgoblin New Blood Stage was the place to be if it was up-and-coming metal action you were seeking, which we all were, of course. A highlight came from the ace Raised By Owls, whose immensely catchy ‘party grind’ music had to be experienced to be believed.

We noticed quite a few people making the laughable error of pronouncing the name of Germany’s most insanely metal band as ‘Kreator’. That’s just silly – it is, of course, pronounced ‘Kreate-AAAAGH!’ Fortunately, most of the crowd over at the Ronnie stage were well aware of this, shrieking the band name in a wholly correct manner while exercising their cervical vertebrae to thrash classics like ‘Flag Of Hate’ and ‘Tormentor’.

Canada is the most metal country in the world, as everyone knows, and Annihilator delivered the goods with no punches pulled. If you were a guitar nerd (and who isn’t?) and you saw Jeff Waters shredding like a maniac, you definitely left with a foot-wide grin on your face. Thrash-hounds were in for even more of a treat when Municipal Waste hit the Ronnie stage with their mesmerising, high-paced metal for those fond of tight jeans and hi-tops.

And of course, how could we forget Ghost? Even though they were a few minutes late taking the stage, the Papa Emeritus and his Nameless Ghouls had us all in the palms of their evil hands from start to finish. Rarely has any band dominated our event as capably as these anonymous villains, and we loved every minute of it.

Craziest moment of the show? Definitely the ultimate Mexican grindcore nutters Brujeria doing a cover of ‘The Macarena’ called ‘The Marijuana’, the scamps. Most metal moment? Jeff Becerra of the original death metal band Possessed, delivering the roars from his wheelchair with twice the fury of an able-bodied man half his age. You think you’ve got commitment? That’s real commitment.

What else? Only Amon Amarth, Decapitated, Testament, Arch Enemy, Hell, Skindred, Obituary, tons of other amazing bands – oh, and Megadeth! The state-of-the-art speed metal band, as they’ve accurately been calling themselves since 1985, destroyed us all this weekend with a true metalstorm of soloing, riffing and moshing. It was a classic set all right, from old-school anthems like ‘Mechanix’ through the glory Rust In Peace years right up to the crushing recent album, Endgame. What better way to wind up our event than with a metal band of this calibre? Roll on 2018!