The year Download Festival saved punk (and vice versa)

My Chemical Romance’s infamous 2007 headline set was marred with bottles and boos that sailed over Donington Park from punters accustomed to the tougher talons of Metallica, Black Sabbath, and the like. Presumably trusting in the maxim of ‘if you’re pissing people off, you’re probably doing something right’, founder Andy Copping and the rest of Download’s booking team persevered. One of three top-billed acts the following year was The Offspring, showcasing less eyeliner and fanfare than MCR but not dissimilar roots in the American punk underground. Scan the list of headliners since then and you’ll notice the same names cropping up a lot – real-talk rock and metal royalty that will always have a home at Monsters of Rock HQ (M.O.R. being the festival that Download grew out of). Iron Maiden, for instance, have played the festival a total seven times, beginning with its inaugural edition in 2003.

This is all sort of fine. But is it sustainable?

After The Offspring in 2008, punk-adjacent headliners fall off slightly – there’s Rage in 2010, and Biffy a few times, but neither is quite from that same world – and only really recover with Frank Carter in 2021 and then Fall Out Boy last year. Running alongside this, over the last decade or so, other historically rock-first festivals have increasingly turned away from their bread and butter. No shade to Reading & Leeds, but it has firmly hitched its wagon to bucket hats, nos canisters, and the snapchat militia – nowadays you’re lucky to see one band’s band on the top row of the lineup. This has left a hefty portion of its core fanbase without a roof over their heads.

Download, then, has become a safe haven for the side of alternative culture that prefers dark clothing and skews tattooed. It’s a win-win, mutual-back-scratching affair: fans of punk and the more radio-ready side of rock and metal need a home, while Download needs to expand its rolodex so that Iron Maiden aren’t running for the Leicestershire hills every bloody year.

There are of course other festivals – End of the Road, Glastonbury – where us weirdos can merrily thrive and all are welcome, but Download is an umbrella under which all strands of alt culture, specifically, can now take shade: lovers of brick-and-mortar metal making unlikely pals with more theatrically dressed goth-types; emo drag queens sunbathing with punk brats; makeup and mud. You’ve got skaters, old-school hardcore bros throwing down for Hatebreed, the gentrified ladcore elite (looking at you, Don Broco), and literally hundreds of ear-muffed kids in American Idiot shirts bobbing on dad’s shoulders. The synergy of these subgroups was at its height this year.

And much of that had to do with Green Day.

Don’t groan. You know you love Green Day – or, okay, maybe you don’t but can at least admit that they are indisputably one of the greatest live bands to ever walk the earth. Few bands – powerhouses, institutions – have agreements forged with higher powers like Green Day do: Billie Joe Armstrong literally makes it rain as he sings the line, “Here comes the rain again, falling from the stars,” prompting everyone around me (and me!) to exclaim, “Is this real? Is the rain real?” All he offers in reply is a wry smirk and skyward glance.

Nor could you claim Green Day are phoning it in – at least live. Their peers in Weezer were: a few hours earlier they lethargically slumped through a set composed almost exclusively of material from their first two albums, which, granted, are brilliant enough to stand alone and carry their performers’ apathy, still inspiring kids and adults alike to make the ‘W’ sign with their hands (it’s the same as the what-everrrr one). (The exception to all of this is “Across the Sea” and its bafflingly inappropriate lyrics.)

Conversely, Green Day compromise – they at least attempt to acclimate us to their new material, which makes more sense live than on the lukewarm Saviors, released in early 2024. Having toured that album – as well as the 20th anniversary of American Idiot and the 30th anniversary of Dookie – in 37-song-strong setlists for the last year or so, their live show is strikingly polished.

But then, it always has been. If you’ve seen Billie, Mike, Tre et al. live before, you’ll know the familiar beats – a fan onstage to sing “Know Your Enemy”, the iconic stickered blue Dookie strat coming out for “Longview”, crowd back-and-forths borrowed from Freddie Mercury – but you’ll also know they have surprises up their sleeves. Like the rain, and the ‘Bad Year’ blimp that glides through the night sky above our heads, and the inclusion of Mike Dirnt-penned rarity “J.A.R.” – truly a perfect Green Day song, so perfect that Mark Hoppus accidentally wrote “What’s My Age Again” while trying to learn it. It is a truly euphoric moment when they launch into the uptempo, bubbly deep cut (for the first time in several years) right after the minor-key dirge of “Hitchin’ a Ride”.

Happily, anti-MAGA, pro-England sentiments are plentiful (no one tell Billie Joe that Farage is favourite to be the next PM). When a Trump cosplayer with a self-flagellating cardboard sign appears on the screen, seconds before the band launches into opener “American Idiot”, the cheers are uproarious and get the goosebumps a’bumpin’. Later, Armstrong leads us in an admittedly fatsist but nevertheless enjoyable Trump-directed chant of “you fat bastard!” before cackling maniacally with glee. Making his love for our little country known feels like the other side of that coin – something he can still trust in, for now – as he cries “THIS IS ENGLAND” several times and tells us, emphatically, just how great we are.

Green Day’s appreciation for Blighty became clear back in 2005 during their Bullet in a Bible concert film, which ten-year-old me watched over and over until the box fell apart and disc scorched. “I just wanna say that England is the official home of Green Day from now on,” Armstrong announced over Milton Keynes Bowl during “Minority”, that snarling, anti-in-crowd fan favourite (or band favourite, really) that’s been played at every show since. It felt like an important, even profound, declaration at the time – and maybe it was.

Dannika Webber was only 15 years old when she joined Bullet in a Bible’s 130,000 attendees at Milton Keynes; 20 years later, and she was partially responsible for booking Green Day – her dream headliner – for the Download 2025 lineup, alongside Jenny Cotter, Kam Haq, Phoebe Hagan, and Andy Copping. Together, Webber and Cotter — self-professed emo kids — have had a lot to do with the festival’s renewed focus on punk acts and moves to evolve in recent years. As Webber explains, “It’s been about getting the festival to the point where it’s perceived as that [punk-friendly], so that the artists want to do it and know that it’s not only a metal festival, and not just for an Iron Maiden or a Kiss fan.”

She shares that 44% of attendees in 2025 were first-timers, but also stresses that Download doesn’t want to abandon the old guard, the people who made the festival what it is. “There’s a huge community of people that will come to the festival regardless of who’s on,” she says.

“You can never please everyone at the same time – and there are sometimes some very loud people online – but actually, there is such a big majority of Downloaders who are really open to all types of music. So many newer bands who were on really early, they still had full tents of people singing along, and so many of those people will be like, ‘I’ve never heard of this band, this band, this band, but who should I listen to before the festival?’ Downloaders are real music lovers, so even if they don’t know everyone on a particular day, they will find bands and have a good time.”

Besides the day-one sets from Green Day, Weezer, and Jimmy Eat World – something approaching the poster crew for mainstream ‘punk’ over the last 20 years – there were dozens of other, more rough-and-ready bands flying the safety-pinned flag and seeming right at home in Donington across the rest of the weekend. North-east England’s VENUS GRRRLS – one of those on-early bands Webber alludes to – stirred up the Avalanche tent (hosted by Kerrang! Radio) and everyone’s breakfast on Saturday morning. The quintet occupy the more gothic side of the refurbished riot grrrl crop, taking the dreamy murmurs with the yells, the shoegazing walls with the prickly power chords – sort of like Lambrini Girls teaming up with Evanescence.

Poppier and more Disney Channel was LØLØ, whose reliable, uplifting power-pop anthems are driven by diaristic fare: “During this weekend you will see many breakdowns but today during my set I share with you my mental breakdowns,” the Toronto-born singer quips, garbed in an equally pro-Anglo Union Jack tank top. Spiritual Cramp, out of San Francisco, brought the high-energy, mic-swinging, in-your-face sleaze-punk (add one part The Strokes to one part Militarie Gun) to keep the flames alive on Sunday morning. And Frank Carter’s Sex Pistols careened through the most chaotic set of the weekend, including four aborted attempts at “Pretty Vacant”.

“Is everyone still alive?” Carter asks from the pit as rain hammers a jumbo-sized crowd. “Apparently you can’t have a circle pit on a slope during the rain.” If the concept of a hugely influential, genre-pioneering seventies band reuniting behind one of punk’s fresher faces makes your eyebrows curl, I’ll say that Carter is simply brilliant – charismatic and deadpan hilarious, the right level of aggressive and louty – the frontman these trailblazing songs deserve. “There is nothing more punk in 2025 than a rainbow flag,” he gruffs later as a rainbow gleams overhead and the rain slows. Their set underscores the idea of punk – and culture more broadly – evolving, getting with the fucking times. They prove that you don’t have to stick with the butter-peddling parts of history, you can take what works, compromise, and press on.

Even though punk is arguably becoming Download’s second squeeze after metal, Download in 2025 isn’t just preserving a space for this kind of music, it’s preserving a space for, as Dannika Webber says, “Everything that fits into alternative culture.” And this is still very much Download: Korn headlines Sunday night. The birds still tweet impishly in the bushes that demarcate the walk between camp and the arena. Donington Castle still observes stoically from the distant rolling hills of middle-of-nowhere Leicestershire. But there’s an awful lot of space up there, undulating behind the main stage – long may Download expand to fill it.