We’ve got a map, but no idea where we we’re going. With MM photographer Adrian Boot at the wheel, we’re driving down what we take to be something called Melbourne Lane – no more than a country track, something used by ramblers and the like – which we’re hoping will take us to Wilson’s Lodge, where we expect to find the backstage area for today’s inaugural Monsters of Rock Festival at Castle Donnington. We’ve been driving down this road for an interminable while, the way in front of us mostly blocked by a stream of denim-jacketed scruffs, an already bedraggled army, toting tents and sleeping bags and other necessary paraphernalia towards the festival camping site. According to our map, Wilson’s Lodge is apparently not far ahead, behind a Rolls Royce depot. So we follow the road, such as it is, along the perimeter of the main festival site, past the Rolls Royce depot, and carry on for another three or four miles. There’s still no sign of the backstage area.
“If we go any further,” Boot moans, “we’ll be in the next county.”
We go mile or two further and up ahead we can see a group of burly fellows in yellow slickers and T-shirts, leaning on a gate.
“What’s this?” Boot bleats, as they signal us to slow down. “The fucking border guard?”
Turns out this is a crew of toughs from the security firm policing the festival. They wave us through the gate into a large compound that looks like the parade ground of some far-flung military base – Khe Sanh, or somewhere like that – with a low-slung breezeblock building that seems to have been pressed into service as a make-shift bar and cafeteria and not much else. There are a few photographers lurking about, looking suitably enough like war-correspondents in their flak-jackets and Wellington boots, most of them caked in mud.
Among them is heavy metal snapper George Bodnar, who’s lucky to be here at all. The previous night, George tells us, festival headliners Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow had staged a full-scale dress rehearsal, complete with pyrotechnics. Rainbow’s intention was to end their show with the most violent explosion they could safely mount without blowing Donnington off the map. To this end, they’d brought in several tons of gelignite. Anyway, the rehearsal was apparently going well enough and Rainbow were roaring towards some typically ferocious musical climax or other when some unfortunate sod accidentally set the whole lot off with a bang you could have heard on the moon. The stage survived the blast, but only just. Judas Priest’s entire back line was blown out, much of the festival PA went up in smoke and one of the massive lighting rigs was severely buckled. The explosion ripped through the tents and caravans in the artists’ compound behind the stage, blasting people out of their lawn chairs and deafening the rest.
Undeterred Rainbow are still talking about going out tonight with a bit of a bang. Following last night’s detonations, however, they’ve been obliged to ask all journalists and photographers covering the festival to sign a document accepting full responsibility for their own safety, indemnifying Rainbow and the concert promoters in the event of “injury or death, however caused.”
Contemplating this, Boot and I make our way to the Arista Records mobile home, where there’s going to be a reception for festival openers, the poodle-haired American rockers Touch. The boys from Touch duly appear. With their tans and curls, they look like professional tennis players. We quaff a couple of half pints of champagne from plastic beakers, just to be sociable, and decide to check things out in the crowd, which is when we run into festival publicity director, Jennie Halsall, who’s festooned with walkie-talkies, radio transmitters, satchels and clipboards, and looks like a member of an SAS assault squad. She says she’s heading for the stage and will drive us if we want a lift, which she recommends because it’s a 30 minute walk, which seems incredible, Boot going ashen-faced on the spot. Jennie tells us if we don’t want a lift with her, we can always catch the mini-bus.
“The mini-bus?” Boot wails, his disbelief growing by the moment.
“There’s a shuttle,” Jennie says. “The bus goes every 20 minutes from the Lodge.”
We decide to go with Jennie, and here she is wrestling with the steering wheel of her Mini as it plunges into one pot-hole after another, waves of mud splashing onto the windscreen. It’s been raining for the last week in these parts, so the whole area is a filthy sticky mess, a huge quagmire. We’ve now come to a series of concrete bunkers that look like the first line of an elaborate military defence system, something like the Maginot Line. We slide down an underpass, and through a complex system of tunnels, the walls of which are slimy with damp, the mud about a foot deep.
Jennie parks the car on the other side of the bunkers. We have to walk from here, and so go squelching off towards the stage, a vast crowd of grimy teens occupying a gentle incline, a lot of them apparently already unconscious.
“Look at that,” Boot says, uncommonly jaundiced. “Up to their necks in shit and not a care in the world.”
Touch are by now finishing their opening set and we decide to head back to the Arista caravan, where the label is hosting a post-show celebration for the band. We arrive expecting gaiety, but are greeted with scenes of catastrophe and flapping distress. A couple of girls from the record company are actually weeping. Jennie Halsall’s on one of her walkie-talkies, jabbering frantically, like she’s calling in the coordinates for an air strike, enemy activity on every front, lines starting to break, a perimeter broached, Charlie inside the wire, drop everything you’ve got on them, now.
What on Earth’s happened here?
One of Touch has swallowed a wasp, that’s what! He’s been rushed to hospital. Will he pull through? Who cares? Boot and I fall out of the Arista caravan weeping with laughter and head for the backstage bar where I ask someone who looks like he might know when the next band, Riot, are on.
“They’ve been on for the last 15 minutes,” he tells me.
We’re so far from the stage we can’t hear a band called Riot playing through 80,000 watts? The day gets better and better. I round up Boot and we head off to the stage, decide after about half a mile that we’re not up to the walk and head back to the Arista bivouac where Jennie Halsall radios for a bus that we have to hoof back at a marching clip to the backstage compound to catch. Eventually, something that looks like a cross between a tractor and a fucking milk float trundles into view, doing about three miles a millennium. It’s meant to carry I’d say about six people. About three times that number clamber aboard, like refugees escaping a burning city. Most of the main tracks to the stage are now pretty much impassable, so we go by what I take to be the scenic route, a diversion that takes us so far out of our way that by the time we get to the stage Riot are just leaving it. We take the tractor, milk float, bread van, whatever it is back to the backstage paddock, where a mud-streaked photographer from The Belper News, a miserable old coot, is wondering what he’s doing here.
“I’ve got a coontry and western concert t’go to t’night,” he says, nursing a shandy. “There’ll be about 200 people, a free bar and a bite t’eat. It’ll be grand,” he adds with an anticipatory smirk, “after this bloody shambles.”
Apparently, Judas Priest are due on next, so we head for the pick-up point to see if there’s a mini-bus we can catch to the stage. There isn’t. There’s a fucking lorry. A dozen of us clamber in the back, where there’s some kind of improvised seating and off we go. It’s a bumpy ride. At one point, the lorry hits something that unfortunately turns out not to be Ritchie Blackmore and I spill most of a treble vodka. Fortunately, most of it goes into the pint of lager I’m holding in my other and, so all is not entirely lost. We get to the stage in time to see Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford riding onto it on a motorbike. I’m hoping he’ll lose control of the thing and roar off the front of the stage and into the photographers’ pit, but he brakes in time, hops off the bike and addresses the multitude.
“Who’s from, uh...uh, north of Birmin’ham?”
The people from north of Birmingham make their presence known with a mighty roar.
“Who’s from, uh... south of Birmin’ham?”
The people from south of Birmingham now weigh in with their contribution to the prevailing tumult.
“Coo-er,” Ron Halford says, as if astonished. “You’ve coom from all over.”
Earlier in the afternoon, we had watched a black Mercedes drive into the backstage compound at some speed, splashing through much standing water and spraying bystanders with mud. It was Ritchie Blackmore arriving to get primped up for Rainbow’s headlining appearance. And that’s Ritchie on stage now, wearing a catsuit, that probably fitted him when he bought it, and what looks like a dead cat on his head, Ritchie sporting the day’s outstanding hair-do, rumoured unkindly by many to actually be an elaborate wig, something from a Restoration comedy or the wardrobe of a drag act. He’s playing a version of Ye Olde English folk tune, “Greensleeves”, through speakers as big as the Empire State Building as bonfires burn across the field and spotlights light up the night sky. We’re actually only still here because we’ve heard that as part of Rainbow’s spectacular finale, Ritchie’s arranged to be shot into the air, as if from a cannon. We can’t wait for that, but the moment never comes. The hydraulic system meant to launch the moody guitarist into space has broken down! This puts Blackmore in such a strop he smashes his guitar and sets fire to his amplifier. There are fireworks going off now, too, things blowing up on stage, smoke everywhere.
“Let’s go,” Boot whimpers. “Please.”
As we struggle back to the car, Rainbow’s drummer, ostentatious percussionist Cozy Powell, starts up a drum solo that incorporates all the loud bits of “The 1812 Overture”. By the time he’s finished, we’re already nearly home.