Story Shared By Neil Bees
I was attending my first ever concert at the Monsters Of Rock Festival (now Download Festival) at Castle Donington in England in 1992. I had bought a ticket weeks before without the hope for a ride to the show which was at least a 2 hour drive from my home.
So finally a friend of mine who had just passed his driving test gets his tickets and off we go. Anyway we get there and the campsite is enormous, so we find a spot to park and set up the tent which was home for the next three days. The Donington campsite is a crazy place, people pumping out music, literally 30-40,000 people all camping in the English countryside around the arena.
The bill for that show was the Almighty, WASP, Slayer, Brit band Thunder, Skid Row and Iron Maiden. That night was awesome as some of the bands were soundchecking and you could hear them clearly from the campsite. To get to the point of the story, we had a campfire going and was listening to some Maiden on the CD player, cooking some sausages and meat on a disposable barbecue, and a bunch of guys come over and start chatting. They were from the U.S. so we got chatting about all the places in the states and the one guy was the spitting image of Dave Mustaine he even had the long ginger hair. So if you know anything about the campsite at Download its basically on the end of the runway for the East Midlands Airport just outside Birmingham and there’s planes constantly going over all throughout the night and they are low maybe a 100 feet above the ground. You can see the runway lights from the tent.
Anyways one of the guys says, “we lost our tent any chance of sharing your tent?” We had a huge tent and there was only two of us, so anyways finally after a 100 beers around 3am we passed out. but every 5 minutes the damn planes were going over our heads and waking me up. this went on all night and this dave mustaine look a like slept like a baby i could hear him snoring all night. so when i finally rolled out of the tent around 8am after about 10 mins sleep I cooked a bit of breakfast and just listened to all the music and noises going on around me, between the planes 30,000 drunks and the music it was chaos. so eventually around 10am an hour before the show this guy rises and crawls out of the tent he sits down next to me and I go, “Fuck man, you slept like a baby.” With all that noise you must be fucking deaf.” At that point he flicks his hair back and reaches behind his ears and turns on his hearing aids and goes “I can lip read and I am fucking deaf.” We pissed ourselves laughing, all the other Americans just cracked up. Such a good concert immortalised on DVD Iron Maiden Donington ’92 just before Bruce left Maiden.
Another crack up that day came as Skid Row hit the stage to “Monkey Business,” It had been bucketing down with rain on and off all day. Sebastian Bach comes tearing across the stage screaming something like “wake up Donington” and slides straight across the stage, falls on his ass, and just keeps sliding off the side of the stage.