Mel Unleashed #2: Download Festival and the Golden Gods

This month I’m here to talk about two of the most important events in any metalhead’s diary; Download Festival and the shenanigans that took place at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods. If you weren’t at either (what were you doing?!), let me fill you in...

For the first time I can actually remember in all of my Download Festival experiences, it was sunny for the whole weekend! This definitely made a difference to last year’s, which consisted of me losing my sleeping bag and lying in my tent drunk, in a soaking wet onesie… but I won’t go into too much depth about that, lets bring it back to this year shall we?

I arrived on the Wednesday to DJ in the Doghouse for all the early birds who arrived a day early for the maximum pre-festival party. My duty for the night was to get everybody revved up for the weekend ahead, blasting out tunes from Avenged Sevenfold, Crossfaith, Bring Me The Horizon, Skindred and of course Linkin Park. Needless to say I succeeded in my mission and by the end of the night I had the crowd in the palm of my hand screaming Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine at the top of their lungs.

Speaking of rage, when the weekend arrived, that’s what it was time to do! Drinking copious amounts of cider and whisky (not together, eww), jumping around like a mad woman to Rob Zombie, Avenged Sevenfold and Fall Out Boy to name a few. But, of course, as a nu-metal soldier the one band I was waiting for was Linkin Park. This was more than just a headliner act to me, this was the band that got me into rock music, the band I had been waiting 12 years to see, and the sounds of Hybrid Theory rupturing from the speakers into my ears literally gave me goosebumps.

After the music wound down and the arena cleared out the fun did not stop for my friends and I, we stumbled down to the Village, got fucked up and went on loads of crazy rides and passed out in a shisha bar (four nights in a row).

Download had sadly came to an end but before I could even think about going home it was time to take a detour to the O2 arena, for a crazy, hectic night working at the Golden Gods. I shoved a Nando’s in my face and got back to business.

Two bottles of hairspray, a pair of ripped fishnets, and a neon pink swimsuit later I was ready to hostess the awards with Steel Panther. One of the highlights of the night for me personally was meeting Chris Jericho. I spent my childhood and teenage years watching him every week on WWE RAW, so one of my childhood heroes casually starts talking to me and I escort him on stage (while internally fangirling)…

Awesome!