“Dream come true”: The show Corey Taylor said nothing could top
When Corey Taylor was brought in to replace the outgoing Slipknot vocalist Anders Colsefni in 1997, the rest of the band felt that his first gig with the group did not go well. Performing in face paint instead of the band’s already-customary masks, Taylor may have wondered whether it was the right decision to join the Iowan clown-metal posse in the first place.
Any doubts would have been short-lived, though. Not only is Taylor still fronting the band almost 30 years later (and now doing so from behind a variety of Slipknot masks, of course), but they very quickly went on to explode out of their local Des Moines scene to become one of the biggest, and most renowned, hardcore acts in the world.
They’ve played in the largest venues in America, Asia, Europe and beyond and have been booked to each and every one of the most hardcore of heavy metal festivals and traveling shows, from Mayhem to Ozzfest, even starting their own annual Knotfest in 2012, but to Taylor, it was another festival appearance which was a particular highlight of his time with the band.
Speaking from the stage at the 2009 Download Festival in Donington Park, Leicestershire, Taylor told the crowd that performing there was a “dream come true”. When he was later asked what it would take for Slipknot to top that appearance, he said that “we’d have to play on Mars, man, honestly. We’d have to headline on Mars with Devo or something, that would be the only thing that would make sense!”
He added that, of the more earthly options available to the band, only starting again from scratch and working their way back up to the top would come close to matching the experience of headlining the festival which has also boasted acts like Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Linkin Park, Korn and Motörhead at the top of the billing since it’s 2003 inception.
“Just start over completely, and for the next album, all we do is play clubs – 200-seater clubs. And then work our way back up. You know, headline some tent at Download,” he said, before adding that “that’s the only thing that would make sense to me is to start over. Where do you go though? Besides that it’s Hyde Park or Glastonbury. I mean, Download is the top of the mountain”.
Though Slipknot have yet to play Hyde Park, they did make it to Glastonbury in 2013 and have returned to live the Download dream again (and again), headlining the festival a further four times. None of the appearances will have been as impactful or as meaningful to the band as the first, when they drew a crowd of 80,000 for their 17-song set.
Even before they went on, the band were confident this was going to be the show of their lives, with percussionist Shawn Crahan saying that “it just seemed like there was no way it could fail. It was going to be in the top five best shows of our careers, and that’s basically what it was. We got off the stage and all nine of us felt the same thing, we knew that we destroyed 80,000 people”.
