- published: 12 Jul 2016
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Download Festival is a British rock festival, held annually at Donington Park in Leicestershire, England, since 2003. It is the most popular British summer rock and heavy metal festival and has hosted some of the biggest names in rock and metal including Saxon, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Rammstein, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Muse, Motörhead, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Kiss, Judas Priest, Status Quo, Motley Crue, Journey, ZZ Top, Whitesnake, Thin Lizzy, and Guns N' Roses. One innovation at the 2015 festival was the massive technological surveillance by police in conjunction with festival organizers Live Nation UK. RFID wristbands and facial recognition technology was used to compare visual scans of attendees against a European criminal database.
The Download Festival was conceived as a follow up to the Monsters of Rock festivals which had been held at the Donington Park circuit between 1980 and 1996. The first Download Festival was created by Stuart Galbraith, Tom Pyke and Andy Copping in 2003 in the same location. Rather than run as a single day event Download was initially a two-day event, expanding to three days in 2005.
Steel Panther is an American comedy-glam hard rock band from Los Angeles, California, mostly known for their profane and humorous lyrics as well as their exaggerated on-stage personae that parody the stereotypical "glam metal" lifestyle in the 1980s.
The quartet began to gain popularity in the Sunset Strip during the early 2000s under the name Metal Shop (soon changed into Metal Skool, then into Steel Panther). Their lineup consists of vocalist Ralph Saenz ("Michael Starr"), drummer Darren Leader ("Stix Zadinia"), bassist Travis Haley ("Lexxi Foxx"), and guitarist Russ Parrish ("Satchel"). The band did weekly shows on Monday nights at the Viper Room, and subsequently the Key Club, playing covers of 1980s hair metal hits while parodying the bands that made the songs famous. Despite the name changes, and some members putting in time in a Van Halen tribute band, they finally managed to gain some success. In 2003 Steel Panther published Hole Patrol, their self-produced debut. The band appeared in a Discover Card advertisement as Danger Kitty and in the sitcom Drew Carey Show as themselves. Also in 2003, their song "Death to All But Metal" was included in a compilation CD called Hey, That's What I Call Sludge! Vol. 1 put out by the Metal Sludge web site. Their cover of the song "Fantasy" by Aldo Nova was used as the opening musical theme for the MTV program Rob Dyrdek's Fantasy Factory. On November 27, 2007 Metal Skool played original songs as well as covers of KISS songs at the Gene Simmons roast, they can be seen in the background of Gene Simmons' reality show Gene Simmons Family Jewels. That year, they also appeared as themselves on Las Vegas in the episode "The High Price of Gas".