System Of A Down

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Download Festival 2005

Friday 10th to Sunday 12th June 2005
Donington Park, Leics, England MAP
£105 for 3 days, camping £22.50 extra, days £45 or £50

When I saw that System Of A Down (SOAD) were headlining Download, my first thought was that they can’t be big enough to headline. However whilst looking around the arena just before they were due to arrive onstage, I could see that these have certainly grown in popularity since I last caught them live.

Frontman Serj Tankian has slightly awkward movements on stage and you could quite easily mistake him as a Howard Stern look-a-like.

Love them or hate them, you have to admire the vocal ability of Serj. He is able to switch from emo-rock growling straight into falsetto Freddie Mercury style vocals in the blink of an eye.

Where ever you stood in the main arena the lighting display form the stage was so impressive that even if you couldn’t actually see the band - there were plenty of visual stimuli to keep you more than happy.

‘Chop Suey’ was the biggest crowd pleaser of the night - with 50,000 people jumping up and down in unison, this was probably the only point throughout the entire weekend where the entire audience made the effort to join in - even Sabbath didn’t have that effect.

Definitely a superb headliner to have at Download.