England on vo.rs

Whitby Goth Weekend: The Subculture Pilgrimage

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Twice a year a small fishing town on the North Yorkshire coast, population around thirteen thousand, fills up with thousands of people dressed in black velvet, corsetry, top hats, Victorian mourning wear and the occasional set of leathery wings, and the town has gone from tolerating it to depending on it. Whitby Goth Weekend runs every April and every late October, timed to Halloween, and it is Britain’s great subculture pilgrimage — the place a music scene decided to call home.

Bloodstock: The Fan-Built Festival That Refused to Sell Out

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Every big metal festival tells you it loves the underground. Bloodstock is the one that actually built its main-stage pipeline out of it. The UK’s largest independent metal festival is family-run, owned by nobody but the family that started it, and it has spent two decades doing the thing the giants only talk about — putting unsigned British bands in front of a crowd of thousands and letting some of them climb. It sits in the grounds of Catton Park in Derbyshire every August, and it is the most convincing argument in Britain that a festival can grow large without losing its soul.

Download: The Spiritual Home of British Metal at Donington

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Donington Park is a motor-racing circuit in Leicestershire, a ribbon of tarmac in the English Midlands that spends most of the year hosting touring cars and bike championships. For one weekend every June the infield fills with tents and the whole place becomes the most important patch of ground in British metal. Download Festival is what happens there now, and it carries a weight that no new festival could manufacture, because the ground itself has been sacred to loud music since 1980.