Who headlined the first-ever Monsters of Rock festival?
The United Kingdom boasts some of hard rock and heavy metal’s largest, most exciting festivals to date, with modern iterations including Download Festival, Bloodstock Open Air and Slam Dunk continuing to bolster the genre’s greatest voices and bring them face-to-face with their most ardent fans.
Perhaps the most legendary of them all was the Monsters of Rock Festival, whose heavy metal reign ran from 1980 to 1996.
Following in the rain-soaked footsteps of the likes of Woodstock and Isle of Wight, Monsters of Rock was not the first outdoor festival, nor was it the first to champion hard rock and metal: Day On The Green in San Francisco, beginning in 1977, had a similar ethos (and, in 1979, they labelled that year’s show ‘The Monsters of Rock’). But, hosted in the middle of the motor racing track of Castle Donington, Leicestershire, England, Monsters of Rock was the first to deem itself a rock festival, and nearly 40,000 attendees listened to their call.
The concept for Monsters of Rock spawned from promoter Paul Loasby and Maurice Jones, who, in 1980, set out to plan a one-day festival exclusively for hard rock and heavy metal bands. That year, Loasby was working on English rock band Rainbow’s tour of the UK, and thus established the festival as the final show of their tour.
Guitarist and founder Ritchie Blackmore wanted to end their tour with an open-air show and, as Rainbow’s keyboardist Don Airey recalled to Classic Rock in 2020, it was drummer Cozy Powell’s initial note of, “Well, why don’t we hold our own festival?”, that sparked the idea for Monsters of Rock.
Both Powell and Jones knew Thom Whearcroft, the owner of the Donington Park race track, then a largely unknown location in the East Midlands, and chose the site as the ideal host for the event. Setting a date of August 16th, 1980, for the inaugural festival, British heavy metal would secure a new home for fans to revel in the presence of some of their favourite artists. Even the inconceivable amounts of rain that threatened the physical structure of the festival’s stage were no threat to Monsters of Rock, as the crowd arrived in elated droves.
The first lineup included Judas Priest, Saxon, Scorpions, Canadian rock band April Wine and New York bands Riot and Touch. “We were very aware that it was the first festival of its type in the UK and was a major event in that respect,” Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford told Classic Rock. “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 specifically one type of music. Our reaction when we first heard about it was that we’d like to give it a crack.”
Headlining the festival, of course, was Rainbow, without whom Monsters of Rock would not have been conceived. “We had no clue that there would be so many people in the crowd,” frontman Graham Bonnet recalled, “We expected maybe 10,000 at most. I go on stage, look out and see… Christ! There must have been 60,000 or something. No pressure.”
During their set, Powell attempted to create an explosion on stage, but he blew out all the cones on his amplifier, while Bonnet performed a now-infamous impression of animal impersonator Percy Edwards’ birdsong for no reason other than the spontaneity of the moment, chalking it up to “the charm of the occasion”.
“Here was this vocalist fronting a heavy rock band, wearing a Hawaiian shirt,” Bonnet said of himself, “After that anything else was never gonna seem daft”.
Though intended at first to be a one-off event, the festival would continue for 15 years, solidifying the Midlands as the home of heavy metal. The following year saw AC/DC, Whitesnake, Blue Öyster Cult, Slade and more grace the festival stage. Saxon became the first band to appear twice on the festival’s bill, performing again in 1982, while AC/DC were the first to headline twice. Monsters of Rock also expanded beyond the Donington Park race track, holding parallel events in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands; and one-time events in Poland, Belgium, Hungary and Russia, the latter being named one of the largest concerts of all-time, with a staggering crowd estimated at 1.6million.
Heavy metal titans including Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Motörhead and Iron Maiden (to name a few) would go on to perform at the festival, while Guns N’ Roses’ set in 1988 resulted in tragedy, with two fans fatally trampled. The festival was postponed the following year, returning in 1990 with a controlled capacity. The events would follow Monsters of Rock as the festival attempted to continue, before its final gathering was held in 1996, with Ozzy Osbourne and Kiss as co-headliners.
The festival would be succeeded by Download Festival in 2003, with its founder Andy Copping stating, “I’ve always said that Download is the bastard child of Monsters of Rock. No doubt about it”. With a number of other festivals that followed suit, the legacy of Monsters of Rock remains at the forefront of hard rock and heavy metal history, permanently shifting the trajectory of live music.
