Day Two Headliner: Iron Maiden
You have to feel for the early slot bands on the bill, particularly the day after Slipknot, and though Heaven's Basement offer an early highlight, and both Crowns and Young Guns are great, they're all wasted on a half-committed, half-dazed audience. Mastodon are typically complex and typically impressive, but they're too low down the bill, which is an inevitable consequence of booking so many bands onto one bill, and the crowd only begins to swell when grunge legends Alice In Chains arrive on stage to wade through their back-catalogue and show some promise for a new dawn. Next up come Motorhead Download's favourite sons, who seem to turn up every year, play the same set, and inspire the same, impressed response every time. They're loud, they're iconic and there's something about Lemmy's iconic growl and the ear-bleeding volume of his music that fits perfectly here. The biggest disappointment of the day comes with the clash of Jimmy Eat World, who arrive just as the sun gets his hat on, and Queens Of The Stone Age, who are fundamentally unmissable. The first few songs of JEW do offer more promise than the last time they played and their sound was swallowed up by unforgiving cross-winds, but it's quickly time to set up in front of Josh Homme and his compadres down at the Main Stage. Homme is on top form, swaggering coolly through a gloriously tight set, dripping effortless charisma between beautifully executed songs that drag a sunny, but still quite dull Donington over to California. It's all over too quickly, sadly, but the Queens own Saturday and their recently announced stadium tour has just got an awful lot more essential. What can you say about Iron Maiden that hasn't been said before? They're sometimes rather cruelly seen as the grand old dames of British heavy metal, and at times they play up to that stereotype, even announcing their arrival with a rousing Spitfire fly-over that beats any musical intro ever played at Download. But they're still a remarkably important band, as the swollen crowd confirms, and they know exactly how to make their fans happy, blazing through grand-standing metal and furthering their own mythology in the process with a tight, and well-executed set-list that will have inspired even the most undecided of voters. But again, the day belongs to Queens Of The Stone Age, who you need to go and see live. Let's hope the next few years sees them return as headliners alongside Foo Fighters. And finally, Sunday and Rammstein...