Who'd have thought black would be the order of the day at Sonisphere? Credit: PGBrunelli/Sonisphere

Knebworth Park, Hertfordshire
1-2 August 2009

The Sonisphere campers gradually awaken to blazing sunshine, which is set to last the whole day. As a result of the weather, and an influx of day ticket holders (looking around the arena, there could be up to twice as many people here today compared to yesterday), there is much more of a festival vibe. Everyone is still wearing black though.

Buckcherry kick off proceedings, and even though their scuzzy LA rawk isn’t reinventing the wheel, it seems like the perfect soundtrack for sitting round in a field on a sunny day. “This song’s about child abuse, it’s called ‘Rescue Me’,” says singer Josh Todd before the group launch into another swaggering Sunset Strip anthem. Here’s hoping they’ll address the genocide in Darfur next album.

I’m just about to head over to the Saturn stage to check out Paradise Lost when a group of men in marching band jackets and scandalously revealing tights appear next to me. After some dreadful flashbacks to my Salvation Army days, I realise that Blaas of Glory are back for an impromptu second set in the middle of the arena. A crowd quickly gathers round to sing along to ‘Living on a Prayer’ by Bon Jovi, ‘Highway to Hell’ by AC/DC and ‘Why Can’t This Be Love?’ by Van Halen. Sorry, Paradise Lost, but Blaas of Glory are just too much fun to miss.

It’s quite a mood shift from the carnival atmosphere of Blaas to the paranoid, industrial soundscapes of Killing Joke. Last time I saw the eighties legends, the whole set seemed to blend into one long pounding dirge, but things gel better at Sonisphere, and even though they can’t quite hit the notes on ‘Wardance’, they’re still pretty ferocious and the atmospheric swathes of keyboard and echoing guitars on ‘Eighties’ and ‘Requiem’ ring out into the clear sky.

The compère announces that Saxon are coming up to their thirtieth year as a band, but it seems like their birthday present from Sonisphere is the worst sound of the festival, the guitar and bass veering between too loud and inaudible, and the vocals sounding like they’re coming from a field miles away. It improves after a while but is still pretty abysmal. The NWOBHM legends deserved better.

“We came to England to do one thing only, and that’s to tear this fucking place apart,” growls Randy Blythe, front man of Lamb of God. True to his word, the Southern metal heroes put on possibly the most brutal set of the weekend, their violent mix of thrash metal, death metal and grindcore churning the crowd into a mass of circle pits and walls of death. They also have some of the most panto-friendly banter going, telling the crowd to “give yourselves a motherfucking round of applause” before exhorting them to ever greater levels of violence. It’s an utterly uncompromising sound, but pretty exhilarating at this level of volume.

Straight after Lamb of God, it’s on to Mastodon. The two are some of the only newish bands on the main stages and it’s hard not to take their sound – which harks back to the razor sharp precision of the thrash movement – as a rejection of nu metal’s polished commercialism. Mastodon are clearly also influenced by that most unfashionable of genres, prog rock, but they cut it down to the bare bones, tying intricate guitar lines and concept heavy lyrics to tight, intense song structures. Ignoring breakthrough album Blood Mountain, most of the set is taken from new release Crack the Skye, but they send fans away happy with old favourite ‘March of the Fire Ants’.

It’s the worst-kept secret of the festival that the anonymous “special guests” will be Machine Head. The Oakland metal giants had been set to play but pulled out in disgust when Limp Bizkit got placed above them on the line-up. The organisers clearly managed to arrange some kind of last minute deal though, and singer Rob Flynn isn’t shy about discussing it. “Last week, when the promoters begged us to play, it wasn’t for Sonisphere, and it wasn’t for Limp Bizkit, it was for you guys. It is an honour to play for you guys, it is a privilege.â€�

Metal bands say stuff like that to their fans all the time, and although it sounds like a line, they all say it with such conviction that it’s hard not to be taken in. Metal fans give the love back too, cheering when they’re asked if they want to hear a new song, jumping like maniacs when they’re asked to jump. There’s none of the crossed-arm jadedness of the indie fan or the feigned indifference of the alt rock performer. It’s a wide-eyed, enthusiastic, utterly unpretentious love-in, and it’s pretty refreshing after going to a decade’s worth of gigs where no one dances because they’re afraid of looking uncool.

“I heard a rumour that something fucking crazy’s going to happen over here,â€� mumbles a tired-looking Fred Durst, hidden under a baseball cap with his jacket zipped up to his chin in spite of the heat. Newly reunited with guitarist Wes Borland, Limp Bizkit sound great, but the whole show feels a little perfunctory. They roll out all the hits, from ‘Nookie’ to ‘My Generation’, but often Durst can only be bothered to sing the first line of the chorus, interspersing the rest of it with indifferent demands to “get the fuck upâ€�. Limp Bizkit can be a great live act, but they seem to be cashing a cheque today.

It’s always tough to replace a singer, especially when that singer is as messed up and tragic as Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, who died in 2002 at the age of 34. After recording Dirt in 1991, a paean to heroin, Staley’s addiction started to control his life and he rarely performed again. Some fans saw it as disloyal when the rest of Alice in Chains announced they would be touring and recording with a new singer, as if Nirvana had simply replaced Kurt Cobain after his suicide, but new singer William DuVall is a revelation. If you close your eyes during ‘Them Bones’ or ‘Again’, it sounds like Layne Staley on a really good day, the way he must have sounded before crack and heroin destroyed him. On first listen, the new songs sound competent if unspectacular, like Dirt-era tracks that didn’t quite make the cut, but I’m still a lot more interested in their new album than I was before I saw them.

All weekend, the festival has been buzzing about one set in particular, that of Nine Inch Nails, as this is rumoured to be their last ever UK show before retirement. Given that Nine Inch Nails is basically one man, Trent Reznor, and a constantly shifting cast of supporting players, it’s hard to tell what it means for someone to break up with himself, but Reznor has stated that he will carry on making music, so the “break up” could be a means of drawing a line between Nine Inch Nails and his next project.

If this is to be Nine Inch Nail’s final UK show, then it turns out to be a pretty strange ending. Aside from manic-paced banger ‘Wish’, the set is made up mostly of quiet songs, with cellos, keyboards and thumb pianos proving to be as important as electric guitars. Dotted with rarely-played gems like ‘The Downward Spiral’, the instrumental title track of the 1994 masterpiece, it’s a beautiful, atmospheric set. Sadly, the Sonisphere crowd don’t have much time for beautiful, atmospheric stuff, and start chatting among themselves like they were standing at the bar for a support band. Trent Reznor barely says a word throughout, they close with the heart-breaking ‘Hurt’, and then they’re gone. An odd, slightly awkward close for one of the most influential bands of the last twenty years.

Metallica bring the festival to a close in what can only be described as a 'rocking out' fashion. Credit: PGBrunelli/Sonisphere

As the sun starts to set, an expectant hush falls over Knebworth as everyone, from eight year old kids to 60 year old veterans, finds a spot for Metallica. Looking at the number of people, and the age range of the fans, I start to grasp how big Metallica are, and how devoted their fanbase is. You get the feeling that even if the only band booked for Sonisphere had been Metallica, the majority of the festivalgoers would still have turned up. To put Metallica’s popularity in perspective, U2’s last album, No Line on the Horizon sold 484,000 copies in its first week, while Metallica’s last album Death Magnetic sold 490,000 copies in just three days. With little publicity or radio play, Metallica are one of the biggest bands in the world, with a fanbase that spans generations, despite the fact that they make utterly uncompromising heavy metal.

Striding onstage to Ennio Morricone’s ‘Ecstacy of Gold’ from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, they kick straight into ‘Blackened’ and ‘Creeping Death’, and the crowd erupts. Twenty foot columns of flame leap into the air for ‘Fuel’, but that is pretty much the only track from Re-Load, and the Load and St. Anger material is totally absent. There is a lot of stuff from Death Magnetic, and tracks like ‘All Nightmare Long’ are greeted with as much enthusiasm as anything from Ride the Lightning. Over the course of two hours, they establish themselves as one of the greatest live bands in the world, tight and professional, with an unassailable back catalogue from 28 years of recording.

They make a lot of speeches about how much they love playing for us, and how glad they are to be here, and I catch myself wondering how genuine it is and whether these charmers just say that to all the arenas. The fact is they probably do say it at every show, but they also seem to mean it at every show. Even after they finish and the instruments have been switched off, they hang around onstage for another fifteen minutes, leading chants, making speeches, and generally looking reluctant to make their exit.

Lars Ulrich, sweating and beaming, takes his turn at the microphone and says “We’ve played like six of these Sonisphere festivals, and this was the one. This was it.�

They finally leave, and everyone streams out into the night. The inaugural Sonisphere tour may have had some rocky patches, with disputes, delays and no-shows, but it was a still pretty triumphant run. Download is definitely in with some competition in 2010.

Highlights of the UK Sonisphere festival will be shown on Channel 4 at 12.05am on 14th August

By Tom Brown