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Rainbow Monsters of Rock - Castle Donington Donington Raceway, Derbyshire U.K. - August 16th 1980 Reviews: part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 5 - part 6 MONSTERS OF ROCK REVISITED 
Only a few short weeks to go until D-Day (that stands for 'Donington-Day', sucker!). Yep, Monsters Of Rock 1990 is almost upon us... and to whet your appetites for this year's event, here we present the first instalment of a three-part serialisation of JOURNO JEFF CLARK-MEADS' upcoming book on the world's foremost Heavy Metal spectacular! This ish we backtrack to the festival's genesis in the summer of 1980, and a bill featuring TOUCH, RIOT, SAXON, APRIL WINE, SCORPIONS, JUDAS PRIEST AND RAINBOW...YOU KNOW the problem. It's late on Friday night, you're standing facing your front door with the key in your hand but, due to the effects of spending the last nine hours in the pub, the keyhole has completely disappeared. The world of hard rock and Heavy Metal faced a similar challenge of location 10 years ago. Hands up, then, all those of you who knew where Castle Donington was before that first Monsters Of Rock gig back in 1980. Excluding locals and motor racing fans, that's not many. OK, people, hands down - thanks. For all it had contributed to the contemporary music scene prior to the '80s, Donington might as well have been located in a deep crater on the dark side of the outermost moon of Neptune. Castle Donington has rightly gained a reputation for staging the finest open air rock concerts ever seen on the face of this or any other planet. Indeed, it could be argued that the people behind Donington rock actually invented the concept of the outdoor Heavy Metal thrash. The men responsible in the main for those shows and that reputation are Paul Loasby and Maurice Jones, men who took their commercial life in their hands when, back in 1980, they decided to stage Rainbow, Judas Priest, the Scorpions, Saxon, April Wine, Riot and Touch on an untried site in the middle of a recently-rebuilt racing circuit in a quiet corner of the Midlands of England. Not until these two attempted to breathe life into what became the Monsters Of Rock had anybody put on anything so long, so loud and so heavy. They discovered it was the kind of pioneering experience which demonstrates to you that adrenalin is really brown. PAUL TAKES up the story of how it all began: "When all this came up, I was still working for promoter Harvey Goldsmith, but wanting to leave. The seed in my mind was planted at the very end of Rainbow's 'Down To Earth' tour in 1980, which I'd run. The band were at their hottest and I thought, 'What a good idea if I could persuade their manager, Bruce Payne, and Ritchie Blackmore to do an open-air show to start off my solo career'. The actual idea was born in March 1980. What I needed was an open-air site capable of holding up to 100,000 people within a 50 or 60 mile radius of Birmingham, which is where the biggest concentration of Heavy Metal fans is, and preferably near a motorway, train stations and an airport. When I first saw Donington Park I thought it was fantastic. 
Now Maurice and I have always got on very well. He likes a drink and I like a drink and we've had a few together over the years. I rang Maurice - who was already big in promoting gigs in the Midlands - and I told him that I'd got two of the ingredients to do a show: a band (Rainbow) and a venue (Donington). What I needed was a partner with the third - money. Maurice said he was up for it."I met Maurice and a guy called Mike Goode on site and we agreed Donington was perfect. Well, perhaps not quite, but it's about as perfect a natural amphitheatre as you are going to get. "We set up a company to put the show on, doing most of the work out of Maurice's offices in Walsall, and tried to get on with it. Doing the show was... er... an interesting experience because neither I nor Maurice had done an outdoor concert before." Says Maurice: "It was a crazy venture at the time. We had very, very little time to put it together - about three months in all - so that first year it was the blind leading the blind into blind optimism." PAUL AND Maurice needed all that optimism at times. In the weeks before the show, Castle Donington Parish Council, mindful that their daughters, sons and livestock might be raped and pillaged (though not necessarily in that order) by marauding headbangers, applied for an injunction to stop the show going ahead. Happily, that legal action quietly fizzled out without doing any damage, which is more than can be said for a demonstration of the show's pyrotechnics to the local fire brigade. A couple of days before the concert, fire safety officers wanted to find out what was going to happen to augment Rainbow's set. Paul explains what they were shown: "It was during Judas Priest's soundcheck when our fireworks man, Mad Martin Blake, let off an explosion that ricocheted through the ground, blew out the PA, did £18,000 of damage and could be felt three miles away. We... um... toned it down a bit for the actual show." The idea was that explosives would be set up in the trees around the site and detonated to send shock waves through the crowd. When the demonstration took place, Maurice was standing at the top of the track about as far away from the stage as you can get. He says: "I remember this shock wave coming past me and literally tearing at my clothes. I got back to the stage and there were people lying on the floor; they thought it was armageddon. It was very spectacular but I think if we'd done it on the day the audience would have ended up somewhere near Loughborough." And if those pyrotechnics failed to bring armageddon to Donington, the rain nearly did. The deluge that came down in the week before the first Monsters Of Rock hit the floor harder than a British heavyweight boxer. It went on for five continuous days and made setting up the tons of equipment a bit like some painfully cruel version of 'It's A Knockout'. 
SAYS PAUL: "The amount of rain was unbelievable. Don't forget that I'd borrowed money personally to put on this show and the night before, at four o'clock in the morning when a monsoon is coming down in Castle Donington, I'm sitting there with a bottle of scotch thinking, 'This is the ultimate, the biggest disaster in the history of rock 'n' roll and I'm going to lose everything'. Not that I had anything, but I was going to lose it anyway."Maurice adds: "We'd got over all these problems in putting on the show, then you come to the week before and all it does is piss down with rain. It absolutely poured down. I slept on site on the Friday night and woke up about six in the morning on the day of the show. When I looked out, it was so misty and wet that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. But, in the end, it turned out to be a beautiful sunny day. The problem was, all the damage had been done by then. "The show went ahead and everybody got covered in mud – and I mean absolutely everybody, including artists. The bands, though, all took it in good part. They all said they'd never come back again! "In the end, we had something like 35,000 people there and lost money but the day went off without any major problems, really." However, as Maurice says, the weather actually on the day was seriously nice. The sun shone bright enough for Saxon to immortalise it in verse (remember the 'We sat in the sun/And the bands played on' chorus from 'And The Bands Played On') and the day was warm enough to help those brave souls who had queued all night in the rain for the privilege of being first in to dry off a bit. SO, COME midday, the sun was shining bright and American four-piece Touch took the honour of being the first band ever to play before an audience at Donington Park. Their set was tight and breezy but the band's lack of prominence in the aftermath is evidence that it didn't exactly set the world on fire. Even so, it wasn't bad for a kick off and injected a party atmosphere at an early stage of proceedings. Touch did, though, create one little bit of Donington folklore, a story centring around events as the band left the stage. The warmth of the day meant that they finished their set drenched in sweat and gasping for a beer so (not unreasonably) bass player Doug Howard grabbed a can of brew as soon as he got out of public view. Such was his enthusiasm for a bit of lubrication that he completely failed to notice a bee that was sitting on top of the tin also filling its belly with ale. Now, the bee was distinctly peeved about being swallowed (again, not unreasonably) and stung Doug in the throat as it went down, instantly bringing the American to his knees vomiting. Doug was rushed to the first aid building backstage and, as the press clustered round the door, the band's manager, Bruce Payne, came out looking grim-faced. There was a hush as he announced: "It was touch-and-go but the doc's finished work and he says the bee's going to pull through." Doug's cry of 'F**k off!' from inside proved he had suffered no lasting damage. Next up were Riot, a band whose name had caused the local constabulary to raise an eyebrow, fearing that they might be promoting a new line in public disorder. They weren't, although things did get a bit rowdy by the time Saxon took the stage. Big bad Biff Byford was at the height of his ear-bashing, crowd-exciting powers in those days and if anybody was 'getting tired' (to quote what became his catchphrase) they didn't show it once the band launched into the likes of 'Wheels Of Steel' and 'Strangers In The Night'. Perhaps the biggest reaction Saxon got, though, was for 'Backs To The Wall', a song that was included in the album of the show, a long-deleted Polydor volume called (imaginatively enough) 'Monsters Of Rock'. APRIL WINE were next on and presented a smooth, cultured set which was a fine counterpoint to the Scorpions who, in the following slot, were at their raucous, rampaging best. Most folk I talk to seem to think that their version of 'Another Piece Of Meat' that day had an edge and a venom that they haven't seen before or since. Then we came to Judas Priest and possibly the most famous quote ever launched from a Donington stage. Singer Rob Halford, excited about playing less than 40 miles from his native West Bromwich, asked mid-set: "Who here is from north of Birmingham? Who's from south of Birmingham?" As an audience who had gathered from every corner of the country and many parts of the world tried to work out what was the significance of Birmingham and whether Helsinki was north and Texas was south, Rob added: "Cor, you're from all over the place, aren't you?" 
Rob still remembers the incident well. "I don't think anybody really knew where people were coming from," he says. "I was just trying to establish very roughly where people had travelled from." Er... yes... OK, Rob.Priest's set that day was sharpened by the fact that the band had just returned from an American tour and, as Rob says, were primed and ready to go. For the band, there were several other factors that made the show particularly exciting, like the fact that Priest have known Maurice for years – Rob actually lives next door to him in the West Midlands – and the trail-blazing nature of that first Donington. Rob recalls: "We were very aware that it was the first festival of its type in the UK and was a major event in that respect. Our initial reaction when we first heard about it, like most people in the rock business, was that we'd like to give it a crack. When I first spoke to Maurice about it, he was very excited and with him being so closely associated with Priest made it even more exciting for us. "When I saw the bill, with Rainbow headlining, I thought it looked great because it was all Metal. All the festivals that had happened in the UK before had had a cross-section of bands so this was the first to go with specially one type of music. "ON THE day, I thought it was cracking. It was especially good for us because they were our home crowd if you like and we felt very comfortable. Really, though, it doesn't matter if a Metalhead comes from Birmingham or Glasgow or California, but we were aware that we were just a few miles from our home turf." Rob readily admits that he was very nervous before the show and, if you ask him how he coped with the tension, he'll give you his time-honoured recipe for relaxation: "About a dozen pints of Banks's ale." Another man who figures prominently in the saga of the Donington fireworks is Cozy Powell, the Rainbow drummer at the time who played his last set with the band at the Monsters Of Rock. He reckons the test blast that blew out Priest's equipment actually lifted up the stage by about six inches. Of Priest's reaction to the damage, he says with a hint of understatement: "They weren't too pleased. I think there was a bit of swearing done". Those fireworks were originally intended to go off during Cozy's drum solo, as he explains: "Being my last show with Rainbow meant that it was a bitter-sweet festival for me and I was determined to go out with a bang. "I remember there was a lot of tension in the air when we took the stage and on the night it was a case of every man for himself. I don't normally have a drink when I'm playing because it slows me down, but that night I was so agitated that I have to say I did have a quick bevy." RAINBOW'S RITCHIE Blackmore handled his nerves in another way. Before the show, he meditated in a tent filled with candles that had been specially set up for him at the rear of the stage. That gave him the kind of confidence you need to go out and play games with a multi-megawatt, quadrophonic sound system. For those of us in the middle of those four stacks of speakers, the results were impressive. You felt cocooned by the songs and, when Ritchie got aggressive and let rip, it was like being nailed to his wall of sound. He evidently enjoyed himself that night, too.As is his custom, he led the rest of the band a merry dance at times, launching into 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow' without warning or having mentioned it to any of them before the set. It says a lot for the quality of musicianship within Rainbow that they immediately picked up what he was doing and went with him all the way. In the end, Rainbow's set was magnificent. Ritchie was at his most imperious and inspired, Cozy drove along with his customary power and precision and singer Graham Bonnet led the line superbly, despite his white jacket making him look a little like an ice cream salesman. It was a triumphant end to a triumphant day... 
IN TERMS of the future of the event, though, the most significant success was that 35,000 turned up, very, very few of them got into any kind of fuss and they went away again, either drunk, happy or both. The police, who have been big supporters of Donington rock over the years, congratulated everybody on the way they behaved and even a spokesman for Castle Donington Parish Council – those steadfast guardians of right and public decency – was forced to admit he was 'quite pleasantly surprised'.Maurice Jones looks back on 1980 with: "What can you say about it? It was the start of something, even though at the time we had no idea which way it was going to work out at all. It was done with a lot of hope but without knowing where it was going to lead us". Paul Loasby adds: "It was a great day. That show Rainbow put on is still one of the best headlining performances seen at Donington. We knew the press were going to slag it off, though, because nothing like this had ever been done before. Nobody had ever done a true Metal festival before; it was the first of its kind and it was an incredible risk. "Even then, my feeling was that this could be a show that would run and run and run. The only problem was that getting the right headliners was always going to be difficult because it's not easy to keep finding Metal bands who can pull in 50,000 or 60,000 people. "Even the locals liked it after they'd seen it. They'd much rather have a rock show than motor-racing at Donington Park because the crowd are so friendly – they're the nicest kids in the world. The pubs that opened couldn't sell enough and every other trader that opened couldn't sell enough." THE QUESTION then arose of whether that strikingly successful first year would be repeated. It was always in Paul's mind that Donington rock would be an annual event, and his vision came that much closer when, on the day of the show, Paul and Maurice spoke to then-AC/DC manager Peter Mensch. Says Maurice: "We decided we were going to do another one when we were told by Mensch to start looking to do a show with AC/DC next year..." OUR SERIALISATION of continues next week with a blow-by-blow account of the 1984 festival, which featured the awe-inspiring line-up AC/DC, Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne, Gary Moore, Y&T, Accept and Mötley Crüe! 1980 FESTIVAL FACTS! NOBODY WHO was there will forget the first year's mud. One of the mini-buses used to ferry staff about the site lost a door, which promptly sank beneath the underfoot brown stuff and was never seen again! ON THE day of the festival the weather was good enough to persuade Rainbow's crew to strip down to their T-shirts, each of which bore the legend, 'No head, no backstage pass'. There are some of us who wish they'd kept their coats on... JUDAS PRIEST guitarist Glenn Tipton took home some spare festival fireworks as a souvenir of the day's events. He didn't discover the difference in potency between your average five quid box of rockets and the professional type until he let off one of the latter in the garden of his Walsall home on Bonfire Night. His garden looked like the battlefields of the Somme the morning after... RAINBOW VOCALIST Graham Bonnet forgot the words to the band's meisterwerk 'Stargazer' and busked his way through two verses. He might have just got away with it, too, had the song not also been included on Polydor's live 'Monsters Of Rock' LP, giving people the chance to analyse his ad-libbing at leisure... JUST ABOUT everybody has fond memories of Donington 1980, even Rainbow publicist Jennie Halsall who was sacked as soon as the review of her band's show appeared in print. Referring to the temporary nature of many of Rainbow's musicians, she retorted when told of her dismissal: "At least I lasted longer than most band members! Captions & Photo credits: RITCHIE BLACKMORE of 1980 Monsters Of Rock festival headliners Rainbow - © Michael Johansson/Repfoto A SITE for sore ears! Aerial view of the jam-packed Donington arena - © Ross Halfin ROGER GLOVER of Rainbow and wellie roadie - © Robert Ellis COZY POWELL and Roger Glover try to wrest copies of Rainbow's then-current album 'Down To Earth' from the clutches of festival DJ Neal Kay. Unfortunately Kay's forefinger has been spot-welded to the LP cover... - © Paul Canty/LFI THE STAGE (background), the crowd (middleground) and the buildings in which critics who slagged off Rainbow were incarcerated (foreground) - © Robert Ellis Kerrang! Magazine Issue #1837 - August 2020  |