Photo: Richard Gray
The final day at Leeds Festival was met with a collection of blisteringly heavy acts, rounded off by heavy metal kingpins Metallica.
The day began with a metal act on the opposite end of their careers. Japanese teen-rockers Babymetal opened the main stage to huge fanfare - but the wave of anticipation from the crowd did little to faze them. The mix of dance routines and metal idol was irresistible and it was bewildering.
Another act gathering momentum these days is Slaves, whose NME/Radio One stage set was met by a packed out crowd. Slaves are a strange one. It's difficult to understand how such a niche act are snowballing with popularity, yet their charming and crunching update on an 80s cockney punk manifesto makes them very difficult to dislike. And so it proved, with the Kent duo developing a strong rapport with the crowd.
Back on the Main Stage we learned that post-hardcore stalwarts Alexisonfire are, astonishingly, still a thing. Having seen off a cavalcade of mid-2000s soundalikes, the fact Dallas Green and co still draw frenetic and youthful crowds as they did on Sunday is testament to their work rate and longevity.
The Canadians also win the award for best crowd surf of the weekend, when singer George Pettit sang from a rubber dingy atop a makeshift sea of fans.
There was room for some classic bubblegum hard-rock with festival veterans Ash taking to the Festival Republic stage. Tim Wheeler, once UK alternative rock's teen heartthrob, is now nearly 40, and the Irishman informed the crowd that this year sees the 20th anniversary of breakthrough single Girl from Mars (feel old?). Despite the depressing realisation that a lot of the festival revellers were probably in nappies the last time Ash bothered the charts, the three piece killed it. But, with such an impressive repertoire of hits, would you have expected anything else?
Back on the main stage, Bring Me The Horizon frontman Ollie Sykes chose the occasion to make the fanciful claim that he was to going to high five the entire crowd. A half-hearted attempt which failed miserably.
All the buzz backstage had been around whether or not the Sheffield alt-metallers were ready to be second on the bill at a major festival. But Ollie and the boys did not disappoint, ditching almost all of their more hardcore early material for their more recent anthemic, bleak soundscapes.
After an eighties heyday, British metal has waited a long time for another band to have such transatlantic commercial appeal as BMTH, and after their merciless sonic bombardment this weekend you get the feeling these lads can be as big as they want to be. They've basically won metal.
The only thing keeping Metallica from being upstaged by five floppy haired lads from South Yorkshire was probably their stage show, for which obviously no expense had been spared.
But despite 40-foot projections of Lars Ulrich's sweaty face contorted with concentration, there was fleeting interest beyond the hardcore radius in front of the stage.
Hits such as 'Search and Destroy' and 'Enter Sandman' will always go down fine with any crowd, but a lack of the frenzied anticipation and excitement that so often goes with bands of this size suggests the time may have come for Metallica to step aside and let younger acts stake their claim for the festival crown.
