I just spent a weekend in the Midlands listening to heavy metal at the Download festival. Download is the worst name for a festival ever invented, but I had a great time. Wanna see what I did there?

Here’s Will engaging in a pre-festival shred to get us in the mood. He can cover loads of Metallica songs, and he’s available to cover you in tattoos if you live in London.

We stopped at the service station to practice some Dave Lee Roth type kick jumps.

Here’s where we spent the first few hours of our festival, there was a mix up with our media passes and we nearly had to camp with the plebs in the normal camping 2 miles from the arena - imagine that! Luckily we haggled and bartered long enough to get into the media camping with the clean toilets and the VIP metal disco. It was totally worth looking like blagging, prissy snobs for an hour or two.

Over the course of the weekend I spotted about 20 guys with this written on their shirt. If even one of them got laid because of it, then there’s hope for desperate optimists everywhere.

Not all metal chicks are as hot as the ones in the Motley Crue videos. Who knew?

One of the greatest t-shirts of all time. “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy” etc. etc.

It’s the heavy metal James Corden!!!!

Imagine eating dry oatcakes covered in watery pasta sauce, mayonnaise and shredded damp newspaper (that’s the lettuce) and you’re close enough to the taste of the falafel we each paid 7 quid for.

This was a 24 hour supermarket. There was more than a touch of the Mad Max about it, but it had pretty much everything you needed, even Grazia and Heat. What self respecting metalhead buys Grazia or Heat?!

We can scoff at this boots and shorts combo but I’m pretty sure people scoffed at tight jeans in the 90s and they came back around. I’m investing in this exact outfit now to beat the rush when Chloe Sevigny (or her future equivalent) starts rocking them in 2016.

This is a Status toe.

This is a Pantera foot (it’s not supposed to work as a pun).

Here’s Napalm Death playing. They were the only band I watched all the way through cos everything else they had on seemed to sound like Nickelback.

When I was a kid I used to think people who brought these chairs to festivals were past-it pricks in their late 20s.

More guys than you’d think are into stuff like this.

These sugarcubes tasted weird but everything was super hilarious for about eight hours for the people ate them.

Yeah it looks weird now, but you’ll all be wearing it like that in a few months etc etc

Two great pairs of shorts.

Like I said about those shorts and boots, this shit’ll come back around and everyone with a sailor tattoo will look like they have a load of tribal stuff, so don’t make fun.

I’m looking forward to trucker hats coming back around.

Bodice tattoos will never go out of style, they’re always gonna be hot.

Only one guy‘s allowed to wear his hair like this though.

And DMX t shirts will always be acceptable attire.

These are the best festival shoes I’ve ever worn, they’re all leather Air Max 90s I got off the internet (they were sent from China, leading me to doubt their authenticity) for 40 quid, they’re warm, but also ventilated and even sort of waterproof. However, if you wear them without socks and then put them next to your head when you go to sleep be prepared to have the smell of them wake you up in the night.

Gwar hats can’t be easy to come by in this day and age. If you’ve got one you either know your shit or know eBay pretty damn well.

This was the least sexy festival I’ve ever been to.

The best bit about going to a festival with people in their late twenties is you can see a scene like this, and instead of throwing each other into the mud, you can all look at each other and say, “I’ll go get the car, you pack up the tent and let’s get the fuck out of here”.

Here’s part of the team waiting for the car to come round in the rain. Everyone had lost their sense of humour by this point.

On the van journey home we could go as fast as we liked, drive with our eyes closed and read the bible backwards and nothing fucking happened to us!!

I was absolutely no fun on the way home.

See you next year Midlands!!!