Bloodstock 2024
I grew up in Derbyshire and was 19 when Bloodstock was founded there, so it has been an iconic event to me for a long time. It quickly moved from the county town into the countryside, expanded from two stages to four, and grew into the biggest and best independent metal festival in the UK.
Because I’m currently writing some articles on metal, I was able this year to take a camera on site, photograph bands, and talk with the musicians. This post contains the first edits from four hot mid-August days.
I refreshed my battle jacket especially for the festival, and set out across Staffordshire and Derbyshire on my bike. There were a few bands on the lineup - Green Lung, Architects, and Carcass, in particular - who I’m going to be writing about, so needed plenty of pictures of. But I tried to cover as wide a range of Bloodstock’s many faces as possible. Making the effort to see as many bands as I could made for an interesting experience - there were a few whose albums I’ve never really connected with, so wouldn’t have sought out live, but whose performances here were absolutely immense. Suddenly I understood why people love them so much. I also took lots of photos around the site, because it’s obviously the fans who make a festival…
It was particularly fun (and sometimes surprising), to match fans to their bands. Here are the intensely heavy Brazilian death metal band, Crypta, signing autographs, then playing the main stage…
And it’d never be possible to make sense of a band like headliners Amon Amarth without looking to their hordes of committed fans…
The bands I’d come to see play the main stage were all fantastic, and it was invaluable to be able to chat briefly with some of them in the media tent afterwards. Here are Green Lung, then Architects, then Bill Steer of Carcass (who, to metal fans, is a figure of Lennon or McCartney status)…
And there was lots more great material on the main stage - Opeth played highlights from their ‘90s and early 2000s era of classic albums like Blackwater Park and Deliverance. They were by turns death-metal heavy and acoustically dreamy (exactly as Opeth should be). Hatebreed generated a huge sense of occasion for their celebration of 30 years as a band, and there was even a ceremony for the scattering of Lemmy’s ashes.
The main stage is great for bringing everyone together. But the smaller stages - the Sophie Lancaster Stage, the New Blood Stage and the EMP Stage - are the real heart of the festival. Here you’re up close with the music, and find bands you might never have otherwise heard of. The bands there range from lots I didn’t know, to major players like Sylosis and Satyricon (whose set to close the festival was particularly stunning).
But the New Blood Stage is probably my favourite of all. The bands for this are selected through regional and national competitions (Metal 2 the Masses), and everyone on this stage is both amazing at what they do and excited to be here. The results are performances with the most incredible energy. My favourite of all (possibly my favourite set of the whole festival) was four 18 year olds from Norway, called Slaughterhead (their name taken from what saying “slaughtered” sounds like in a Norwegian accent). They played the most high-energy thrash I’ve ever witnessed - it felt much like it must’ve done to be at a Metallica gig before Kill ‘em All was released. I’m hoping they make it big, so everyone gets a chance to see this live…
This really was the best place to feel close to the action as the lights were raised and the amps turned up. Here’s the excellent Them Bloody Kids…
The smallest and most relaxed tent of all is the EMP stage, where people sit back on the grass to watch bands play in the shade. I didn’t take many photos (it doesn’t have lighting, so is difficult to photograph), but my favourite band I saw here were Crowley…
This was my first chance to take photos at any music festival, and I loved every minute of it, intensely hard work though it was (especially in the August heat, and with a long cycle, laden with gear, to get there and back). I really hope I get to do it again next year, when I’ll be at the stage in my projects to do proper interviews with bands, and when a year editing the 10,000+ photos I took across these three and a half days will have taught me lots more about photographing bands.
The sheer stylistic diversity on display left a really strong sense of the vibrancy of 2020s metal. The old guard - bands 30 or 40 years into their careers - are still producing fantastic music; bands like Slaughterhead are making old-school things sound vibrant; and the diversity of fresh styles is far beyond anything that could have been imagined back in the 1970s and ‘80s eras that many people still mistake for metal’s heyday.
This was an “interesting” time to be at such an event. The first evening of the festival was the day after the momentous Wednesday when crowds turned out on the streets of Britain to show a united front against the far-right riots that had caused chaos, including in nearby Tamworth, over the previous week. The diversity of politics in metal is huge. It includes feminist, queer, anarchist musicians like Ragana, avowedly anti-fascist, anti-racist bands like Green Lung, and Green Party activists such as Architects. But it has also included the open fascism of some early Norwegian black metal, which persists among a few of its followers today. It was great to see so many anti-fascist t shirts round the festival, with messages offering to swap racists for refugees, and equally good to see so many posters and stickers making explicit that far-right metal isn’t welcome. After watching England seem to boil over in misdirected anger, to head to Bloodstock and see so many people milling around in the most relaxed and happy vibe imaginable felt like a cure for the previous week’s cynicism.