DOWNLOAD Festival @ Paramatta Park 09/03/2019

​“It’s your one-way ticket to midnight,” sang Sammy Hagar on ‘Heavy Metal’ the theme song from the 1981 film of the same name. I must have gotten off at the wrong stop becuase by nature or design I’ve always been more taken by the frivolous and all too clever. But you could forgive me for wanting a little bit of metal’s mayhem for my own. And that’s how I found my way to DOWNLOAD. 

​The invitation came from my 31-year-old brother. He’s a schoolteacher by trade but loves metal. Thoughts of heavy all through my head I didn’t think it was a bad idea. If I travelled to metal Mecca, surely I could find what heavy meant. My brother was a way in. If I could glean what it is this music meant to him from there my own path would become apparent.
 
If not, that was okay too. Fly in, drink way too much, nurse the hangover and fly out. What’s the harm?
 
Things became complicated at 6pm the day of the festival. Sitting in an organic food store in King’s Cross I realised quite clearly that I was intoxicated. It came as a blow. It's a hurdle the kind of festival goer who wants to remember anything of what they've seen can't afford to stumble into. But given that home was some 900 kilometres away I decided to press on. 
 
As I entered the festival and black shirts were everywhere. Band tees ruled this world. Those wearing them weren’t just the Sydney tribe either. Others like me and brother had flown in from the interstate. More had come in from the sticks, the coast and just about anywhere you could point to on a map. Metal finds you. While most of music's trends don't reach to far past Australia’s hip urban enclaves, metal penetrates the continent. It shines places much of culture dare not tread. Metal is for all kinds and knows none.
 
And this is where I start talking about the bands. The first one I passed was Airbourne. Their guitar acrobatics rang out and into the night, but I stepped onward because Alice In Chains was the destination. The meat thump to the chest let me know that my brother and I were there. I still remeber the chug. It was volcanic but didn’t last long. Due to my brother’s and my own lateness, sooner than I could have known it was over.
 
Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ blared out during the intermission. At first, I took it as some sort of cruel joke seeing as Ozzy Osbourne cancelled his headline slot some weeks before. But not so. The crowd sung it in the chorus as if Sabbath themselves commanded it. Teen memories of Paranoid long-buried came rushing back.
 
Judas Priest. Rob Halford wore a silver fringed jacket as he shrieked ‘Fire Power’. A fan in front of me with a massive For Vengeance patch enveloping his jacket was losing it completely. I was content to continue observing him, but my brother interrupted. “We’re going in!” he exclaimed. For a second, I was startled. “What?!” He pointed inward and charged forward. I followed.
 
We pushed through a few dozen metallers with a surprising ease. It was all going well, in fact I was starting to feel we might even hit the stage barrier until we collided with the inner mass. These were the true believers. As we arrived at a human wall of locked bodies it was no longer a matter of copping a dirty look. It became immediate that we could go no further.
 
But it didn’t matter to much to me because it was that then that the metal began to really hit me. Heavy metal thunder. Excitement sat thicker and thicker in the night’s air. The set built in in momentum. More horns.
 
Rob wailed. His two guitarists stood either side as they leapt around their instruments. And as this was happening Halford raised a single black leathered finger to the sky. The fans knew exactly what it meant. Horns.
 
The music washed over me. My brother shook his head and jerked his body. He and a hundred others punched the air. The crowd were throwing their own fire against the music.

Then came the motorbike. Halford drove it onstage than stretched out upon it like I’d seen in old copies of Creem Magazine. It revved. Horns.
 
‘Electric Eye’ came late and would have been the peak had it not been tailed quite closely by ‘Breaking the Law’. The Priest didn’t invent metal but with these songs, they reignited it for the 1980s and again tonight. That chopper was still present too, it thundered. I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy Judas Priest because I’m not here to lie to you. 
 
No sooner were Judas taking their final bows did Slayer enter the fray on the neighbouring stage. Their drums pummelled at what felt like a thousand miles a minute, guitars were shredded likewise. Fire blasted behind them. The crowd cheered at their mere presence. “Slaya! Slaya! Slayyyeerrr!” Horns.
 
The band’s goal was simple, to overwhelm. They stood surprisingly still but perhaps that was to avoid immolation. The heat of pyrotechnics were licking my face even from a hundred yards away. I could only have imagined what they were feeling at close range. My brother had a different opinion. He believed that the stood still because Slayer was all business. It didn’t stop him from throwing horns.
 
Then the went lights up. End of show. I was a bit shocked. Where was Slayer’s peak? If there had been one, I must have missed it. Yet I was standing there that whole time.
 
Did the band sell their fans short or somehow was it the case that the crowd betrayed the the band? I was a little disappointed. At least from where I was standing, Slayer failed to conjure the chaos I imagined they could simply invoke at will. To be honest, I’ve experienced more energy and abandon at a Lorde concert. Where was that mayhem I’d caught a taste of at Judas Priest?

Perhaps the crowd was simply at the end of a long day. Maybe the police presence – reportedly sizable – had sucked it out of the night’s air. It could have just been that Ozzy’s absence had left us all a little deflated. Not that anyone was unhappy. This crowd had looked upon legends and now bantered idly as they strolled to the trains that would take them back to the world that awaited them after they threw off the black tee and slipped into something else.
 
“Everyone goes to a festival is looking for something,” I was thinking to myself, knees wobbling up the steps to Harris Park Station. Most of them never find it, but for some reason, they come out richer for the experience. That’s my take anyway. My brother and I sat next to each other on the train. Neither of us said a word.
 
I didn’t think I had found any of the things I’d come to DOWNLOAD intent on uncovering. Despite those peaks at Priest, I’m not even sure I feel any differently about metal. I certainly don’t have any better understanding of how my brother works either, though I do now know that he can commendably throw horns.
 
All this seemed irrelevant though because I was still thinking about that image of my flesh and blood as well as that other Judas Priest megafan during moments of total ecstasy. Rob Halford on a motorcycle too. I tried to hide it as these images crossed my mind on the train trip back to Sydney city, but I have to confess they made me smile.

​Words by Riley Fitzgerald   
Photo Credit: Alicia Scott