‘It’s simply actually good enjoyable’: Download Festival on bringing daftness to Donington

The stage lights dim and a roar erupts from a crowd drenched in black garments and sweat. We’re on the UK’s largest rock and steel competition, Download. The band make their solution to the stage as the ocean of individuals in entrance of them swells to fever pitch. There’s a hysterical stress within the air because the five-piece take a second to take all of it in and it begins…with UK pop royalty Five performing Everybody Get Up?

Those had been the previously unlikely scenes at Download 2026. Elsewhere you’ll see Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park on the principle stage, however amongst these names you’d count on at a proud rock competition, acts like Vengaboys and McFly packed their tents to the rafters performing hits that will have as soon as made purists scoff.

So, why the change? Well, it partly comes with age.

We all suppose we’re music consultants at 16, however over time you realise you can benefit from the drone-doom of SunO))) and likewise recognize that Britney Spears’s ‘Toxic’ is an absolute banger. “There are so many pop bands of the 90s and 2000s that elitists may look at with disdain, but people in their thirties and fourties appreciate how great that type of pop music was back then,” says Dannika Webber, competition expertise purchaser at Live Nation.

Dannika and her staff are behind this shift towards unabashed love of non-guilty pleasure music and a a lot wider array of competition leisure. At Download, she heads up District X (previously often called The Doghouse), which may be very a lot a house for the extra madcap aspect of the competition.

District X characterize a diversifying of the competition expertise, and it reveals how viewers demographics are altering too. For millennials, bands like McFly and Busted had been teenage gateway medicine into the heavier stuff. “Busted and McFly were perhaps once deemed as a guilty pleasure, but now it’s just a pleasure,” says Dannika. “We really feel like we know the audience because we feel like we are the audience.”

Booking these kinds of acts shouldn’t be a tokenistic gesture, both. They’re given the total Download expertise. DJ units from kids’s entertainers Dick and Dom include pryos and lasers. Long earlier than Vengaboys took the stage in 2025, they had been being performed by Download’s late-night DJs and had been one of the requested bands on the competition’s social media. “The Vengaboys might seem a bit wild to an outsider, but there’s always nuance to why we book certain acts,” says Dannika. “Audiences need gentle aid, and the Vengaboys staff actually understood what we wished to do.“

“The key thing with these types of bookings are never meant to be a joke. They’re supposed to be fun and an opportunity to host more great musicians,” Dannika goes on to say. “Vengaboys are already performed by late-night Download DJs and may deliver a celebration, and Five have so many rock references of their songs. McFly and Busted have a pop-punk viewers and are superb musicians in their very own proper. These are the weekend highlights for therefore many individuals.“

While bringing the Venga bus to Donington Park could get the headlines, it’s what occurs within the hidden corners which features equal consideration.

Download for a very long time has catered to its followers past the principle phases, whether or not bringing WWE wrestling to the sector or constructing short-term online game arcades. But when late-night arenas generally start and finish with a silent disco, District X is the place this aspect to Download is on present.

Over the previous few years these outsider leisure has turn out to be a core ingredient to Download. And like all main competition change inside the previous six years, that is partly right down to COVID. Download’s 2021 version acted as a authorities sanctioned take a look at pilot for the way main occasions might function in a brand new regular. In a really literal sense, it acted as a testing floor for the way a virus might unfold at main occasions. But for the competition itself, this pressured them to suppose in a different way into how they would want to do issues sooner or later.

“Prior to COVID, in our area of the site there was one club night per night, but with the pilot we were really able to curate it,” says Dannika. “It proved to be an effective way to get all people within the scene concerned on the similar time.“

After that have, Dannika and her staff had been capable of ask for “more things, more budget, more everything” to deliver new parts to Download. For its 2026 weekender, that included Panic! At The Bingo, a Mecca corridor expertise for emos and pop-punkers. There had been drag reveals, reside band karaoke – “everyone wants to be in the band, right?” says Dannika – and a partnership with the long-lasting gaming collection Final Fantasy. Don’t fancy any of that? No worries, you’ll be able to throw axes or partake in heavy steel olympics. “In the current economy people really want value for money,” says Dannika. “You need to create an experience that isn’t just about seeing a band or getting in the mosh pit.”

That stated, there have been initially some trepidations with what Dannika and her staff might get away with. Metal and rock audiences maintain a stereotype for being considerably purist – there’s a cause for the time period ‘rockist’, in any case. But what Download are doing is asking of us to throw away their pre-held notions of what the competition ‘is’ and embrace a substitute for different music.

That ethos appears to be working. While Download will all the time have its trustworthy viewers, those that return yr on yr to see the Iron Maidens and Metallicas of this world, this extra experimental programming is discovering new audiences. “Last year we had around 44% of new ticket buyers,” says Dannika. “We have our core group who comes again yearly understanding they’re going to love the bands that we e book, however these persons are discovering far more.“

While Download will all the time be superbly absurd in some ways, which incorporates the punters who return yr on yr regardless of the notorious wet climate that Download all the time appears to fall sufferer of. But all that is to say that Download refuses to relaxation on its laurels. “It’s about creating a better experience,” says Dannika. “We simply really need folks to have enjoyable, and our imaginative and prescient all alongside has been to strive create a bit of world that actually celebrates different tradition and push the boundaries in locations. But on the whole, it’s all simply actually good enjoyable.“

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Download Festival takes place 9-13 June 2027. Tickets can be found now.