Download Festival 2025 Thursday

After the excesses of Wednesday’s drinking, we always seem to take Thursday a little easier at Download. Maybe it's age, it’s undoubtedly not maturity! But it did start with the traditional breakfast of sausage, bacon and eggs, cooked on the grill. We have done this most mornings since we started doing RIP. It sets us up for the day ahead and allows us to save a little money that we would have otherwise spent on meals.

Download meals can be expensive. A breakfast option is available at the hotel for around £12.50, but it comes with very minimal food on a paper plate. Our entire food for the week, including a meal each on Wednesday and Thursday, as well as breakfast every day, is £15 per person.

It makes life a lot easier as well, as we can agree on the meals beforehand, and everything can be prepared. This is where having the fridge in the campervan has made an enormous difference, but it may still be possible with cool boxes and ice.

After breakfast, we decided to have a wander around the village for a little while. There were plenty of food stalls and a few little clothing stalls, but there was nothing we needed to look at in any detail, so we headed back to camp.

The great thing about Download is that everyone is there for the same reason: to enjoy the music and be amongst like-minded people. The rest of the morning and early afternoon were spent listening to music and chatting. The first rain then arrived, so I decided to take a little break from life and went for a lie down in my tent.

After a couple of hours, it was time for food. The first couple of years of us doing RIP have included Chris’s famous Paella. So renowned that MasterChef winner Simon Wood had to listen to Chris talk about it for 45 minutes by the courtyard stage one year.

Last year we had an excellent chicken curry. This year we had a Jambalaya. It was exceptional, but there was so much of it! We tried to offer some to a passer-by, but she was a vegetarian… apparently, they don’t like Chicken Jambalaya!

After that, it was time to head to the Courtyard again for night two of the music in RIP, and if last night was interesting, we had no idea what we were about to witness. It isn't easy to describe just how different BattleSnake (9) are from anything I’ve ever seen. As you walk through from the bar, you catch a glimpse of the stage from the side before you see it, and so we saw the costumes from the side. That was a true awakening before we got the full view!

Once we were able to see them properly, we realised how entertaining the next half hour was about to be. The music itself is exceptional, a blend of Sabbath, Priest, and Queen, all seamlessly combined as they work through songs like 'I Am the Vomit' and 'Motorsteeple' with aplomb.

What I wasn’t prepared for, was that they like to do something slightly different towards the end of their set. Both the angelic-looking Keytar player and the Lead Singer decided that clothing was optional and took off their original costumes, stripping down to their pants.

This was hilarious. No problem with a bit of fun on stage. However, the keytar player then took over the mic before the final song, and what we then witnessed became borderline for someone who has completed many Safeguarding courses over the years.

On the front barrier for the entire show was a family. The boy, who could only have been around 9/10 at most, was invited up on stage due to his love of every song they had played. In most cases, this is a wonderful memory for the child. I’m just a little worried that he’s gone back to school and told his class about how he was invited up on stage by two men wearing pants!

In the end, it seemed to be a magical moment for the kid as they looked out upon the crowd and watched in awe as the keytar player took one of the guitarists on his shoulders and climbed the steps of the bridge behind the courtyard stage area. The applause as they finished was rapturous!

The final band for the day were The 900 (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Band) (6). I had high hopes for these guys. I had heard about them a lot, and loved the soundtracks that Tony Hawk’s games had.

Whilst I enjoyed the songs and the band performed very well, it seemed a little bit of a letdown after what we had witnessed before them. Maybe if I’d have seen them the previous night, things may have been different.

Papa Roach’s Blood Brothers and Goldfinger’s Superman were expertly dealt with, and the rousing Ace of Spades finish went down well, but the crowd was a little more subdued than it had been previously. Still, it was a good end to the first two days, and now it was back to the tents for sleep before the first day of the proper music at the festival, and Friday would be a big one…