Monsters of Rock

 “What motivates 50,000 spotty, greasy young people to don tribal uniform and bang their heads in pseudo-nihilistic fashion at these muddy affairs?” Pondered Chris Roberts, a writer for Sounds music paper, despatched, or maybe sentenced, to a field in the middle of the UK in August 1985. The answer was the Monsters Of Rock festival, an event which had originally been conceived in 1980 as the final date of Rainbow’s Down To Earth tour and which, sixteen years and fourteen further performances later, was wrapped up by the freshly made-up demigods of US metal that were KISS, and had seen in the region of a million “spotty, greasy young people” banging their heads in their tribal uniforms.