666 : Bloodstock - Moving with the Times

Bloodstock 2025 selling out a full ten months before the event may have caught some off-guard, but if you stand back and view the linear progression of the festival, it’s really no surprise. Since its inception as an outdoor event twenty years ago, it has operated on a firmly upward trajectory, slowly but surely building in size and stature. When I first started attending in the late noughties, the site felt roomy and almost luxurious in the amount of space it provided us punters. The 25,000 capacity felt an inconceivable and unachievable number as we stood amongst 10,000 of our peers watching Europe, Children of Bodom and Immortal headline. But it is now obvious there was a masterplan. Paul and, subsequently Adam, Vicki and Rachael had a vision, and this year’s early sell-out is a testament to that vision.

But what is the north star that has guided the festival from a distinctly cult event to a bona fide alternative to the behemoth that is Download? For me, both as a punter of sixteen years and a music journalist covering it for the last few years, it is blindingly obvious. The festival has grown, evolved and matured with both its audience and the music that it covers. There are plenty of festivals that I have grown out of. Leeds used to be my destination of choice in the early noughties when Maiden, Metallica and Linkin Park trod its boards, nowadays I swear I don’t recognise 99% of the names on the bill, including the headliners. Even Download feels rather like a foreign country that is going off in a distinctly different direction to that of my distinct personal tastes. 

But Bloodstock has developed with us. It has kept pace with the evolution of my musical appreciation and has morphed its offer as my life has changed. I have friends who I met in the fields of Catton when they were but teens. They are now adults with families of their own, yet they don’t feel they have outgrown or moved beyond Bloodstock. The Gregory family have achieved the incredible by making us great unwashed feel like we are stakeholders in the festival. We are not treated as silent consumers, with no other role to fulfil than blindly opening our collective wallets and feeding the capitalist machine. Through constant social media interaction and brave unswerving honesty Adam and Vicki (with Rachael diligently in the wings) have ensured the festival feeds what we want. The disappearance of the fairground (a constant subject of derision online) is the perfect example of how they listen and mould.

The other zeitgeist, they have kept up with the is the fast-moving development of heavy music. Many may attribute the early sell out to the headline berths awarded to Machine Head, Trivium and Gojira. In the same breath they may well state there is a distinct shift into Download territory, forgetting however that Bloodstock had the former two headline in 2012 and 2015 respectively with no such complaints and that they have championed Gojira for over fifteen years, allowing them to steadily climb the bill. But actually, you need to go under the bonnet of the 2025 bill to see where the real money shots are.

Alongside the veterans and crowd-pleasers, you will find Paleface Swiss and Kublai Khan, unarguably two of the most venerated names in modern metal. These are the bands that are keeping our music fresh and exciting (I would also throw Heriot and Undeath in for good measure) and it is the fact that Bloodstock provides a platform for the bands of the future as well as the names of the past that assures its rude health. Bloodstock are attracting new blood (pun intended) without betraying or abandoning those of us who built its reputation. Bloodstock has changed and grown, but then again, so have the various members of my own personnel bloodstock family. The genius is that we and the festival have changed and grown together.