The First: Damnation Festival

Since 2005, Damnation has championed metal’s niche corners, growing into the world’s largest indoor metal festival. We chatted with festival founder Gavin McInally to look back at that very first edition.

Skiddle Staff

Date published: 3rd Nov 2025

Name: Damnation Festival

Year started: 2005

Original capacity: 1,000

Original location: Jilly’s Rockworld, Manchester

First lineup: Entombed, Raging Speedhorn, Sikth, Gorerotted, Conquest of Steel, Forever Never, Dawn of Chaos, The Inbreds, Allerjen, Amends to the Dead

For fans of: Extreme metal, grind, post‑rock, and all things moshable

“I just wanted to go to something where I could just go and enjoy all the bands that I liked all day long, and there was nothing really there.”

Fed up with seeing his favourite underground bands relegated to 30-minute noon slots at Download and other 00s metal fests, Gavin McInally - founder of the beloved (and now world’s largest) indoor metal festival, Damnation - decided to do something about it.

“I don't want to come across as an elitist pr*ck; it was more the case that it wasn't scratching that itch. Download was amazing for what it was, I had the best time seeing your Tools and your Slipknots, but I also wanted to go into a dungeon somewhere and watch my favourite bands playing to a few hundred people.”

Welcome back to ‘The First’, where Skiddle time-travels back to the very first edition of some of the UK's most beloved festivals, in an effort to capture the spark that propelled them into the hearts of ravers and moshers alike. For this edition, we’ll be leaning quite heavily towards the mosher side of that spectrum.

Getting into metal late - through college years rather than childhood - Gavin McInally fell hard after hearing a VHS packed with Korn, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Smashing Pumpkins. Dutch hardcore and gabba (raver Dad’s influence) had already tuned him to the thrills at the far end of the BPM scale; the jump to metal’s extremity felt natural, even if the aesthetic didn’t.

“I couldn’t have been further from trench coats and makeup; I was just a housing‑scheme boy.” Then a Raging Speedhorn video kicked in the door. Here were British lads, “Neds, Chavs,” thrashing something that wasn’t the “American ‘proud to be a freak’ or ‘goth’ sort of thing”, and paved a path to his first gig - Amen, Charger and Raging Speedhorn at the iconic Cathouse in Glasgow. Before long, he was three shows a weekend deep and living on the Download forums.

In 2004, within those same Download forums, and with the desire to give the niche scenes their spotlight, McInally lobbed a question into the forum ether: if a few of us each threw in £500, could we hire a pub and actually do a festival of the bands we love? “It really was as naive and idealistic and hopeful as that,” he laughs.

Familiar screen‑names lined up to slam virtual wallets on the table. For a few heady months, the DIY fantasy sprinted ahead of reality. Some of those early co‑conspirators - “those with the usual message board bravado hiding behind avatars” - drifted when it became clear McInally wasn’t kidding. Others stuck long enough to start emailing agents, sometimes wildly.

“We went into the process pretty wide-eyed and naive. There was one guy in the team, a guy called Graeme, who was contacting like f**king Dream Theatre and Bruce Dickinson. It was a bit stupid, and again naive, like, how would you feel about coming and doing this thing that the fans have created, as if their management or agents give a shit?”

After all the wild emails and forum bravado, they'd managed to book Entombed - a name with weight, even if they weren’t one of McInally’s personal favourite bands - but it only took one more phone call to make it all feel truly real.

“Of all the f**king memories I’ve managed to kill with drinking, that is one that sat with me forever. I was on Dumfries High Street. I got a phone call from the agent for both Sikth and Raging Speedhorn, and he basically said, “Right, okay, both bands are going to be up for it.’”

He grins at the memory. “I just remember thinking, holy shit, this is actually going to be a lineup. Entombed were a band I had respect for, but I wasn’t sitting there listening to Left Hand Path the way I was the Raging Speedhorn or Sikth albums at the time.”

Gav also admits that early naivety was a blessing in disguise. 23 years old with a career in local journalism mapped out ahead of him, he had no real experience in the industry, and Damnation was really an “overblown hobby.” “I came purely from a journalism route, which is an odd way into this, and an enthusiasm for the music, and there's a real honesty about that.”

“If I'd grown up around bands, and I’d built a deference towards agents and managers, and they all became these sort of spectacular beings to me. By the time I’d come in, it’d have made me so f**king nervous that I could never have created Damnation.”

“I just sort of marched into the middle of Manchester, where I had no right being, and put on a show without knowing the rules and regulations of what the industry wants you to do. Like, why is this guy, Gavin McInnally from Glasgow, promoting in Manchester when there would have been other Manchester promoters at the time? Like, who the fuck is this guy?”

That Manchester decision was deliberate. “In my head, Damnation always had to be the middle of England. I know that people in England view anything above Birmingham as the north, but from Glasgow, and looking at a map, Manchester's pretty central.” Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Liverpool - everywhere central with an existing rock ecosystem was considered, but he knew launching in his native Glasgow would be a slog.

“I'd f**king love it being in Glasgow, I don’t love having to travel all the way to Manchester just to have a production meeting,” he joked, “but even young, naive Gavin McInally knew back then that wouldn’t work. You just don't see the support because the English don't travel up and there's literally not enough of us up here.”

After shopping themselves around a few venues, the team landed on the now mythic Jilly’s Rockworld - “the good sort of dirty, grimy metal venues that we all know and love.” Anyone who passed through Manchester’s heavy scene in the 2000s remembers it: the goth room, the sticky floors, Pot Noodles behind the bar, 7 a.m. finishes. It was loud, lawless and beloved, a rite of passage for anyone who lived loud enough, and unfortunately, it’s now a Tesco.

The venue offered the right blend of grime and guidance: a beloved, scruffy two‑room metal haunt where the in‑house team were “very much a guiding hand,” showing these young out-of-town promoters the ropes rather than switching off once the hire was signed.

Can you spot yourself in the pit?

The show landed in October 2005 with two stages, fifteen bands and a £13 ticket. Whether it was down to the flyering at “alternative metal markets and body-piercing studios in Manchester,” or just “trying to find skateboarders on the corner or anyone you thought might loosely be interested in those bands” - a notion Gav jokes now feels “like you're talking World War II times” in today’s age of Meta Ads - it sold out completely.

In the weeks before, everything was gloriously DIY. There was an old-school message board with a hidden section just for the artists, where bands like Forever Never, Nailed, and Dawn of Chaos traded gear notes. “We were a bit like, okay, well, let's make this somewhere where the Dawn of Chaos drummer can say, ‘I'm bringing my Tama kit, it’s available to share,’ and you guys bring up a cab or whatnot,” he says. “I didn’t know a great deal about backline back then, but the common sense was, why would we have fourteen bands all showing up with fourteen drum kits?”

“Those riders back then were the most insane I’ve ever seen”

Then there was the Entombed rider, a time capsule of mid-2000s rock absurdity. “Those riders back then were the most insane I’ve ever seen,” McInally laughs. “It was socks and postcards with stamps on them, six bottles of red, six bottles of white, a trouser press, batteries, DVDs… and just pages and pages of stuff. We bought so much sh*t for Entombed - that tiny dressing room in the back of Jilly’s, I’d never seen so many f**king sandwich fillings. We had forty different sandwich fillings in there. The best part is, I don’t think they even touched it. Just had their beers and a bit of hot food, and that was it.”

If the rider was a lesson in rock’n’roll, the ticketing was a lesson in arithmetic. “Naively, I thought £13 ticket times 1,000 people was £13,000,” he says. VAT, platform fees, taxes - reality takes big bites. “With that price, £2’s going straight to the government, then you’ve got platform fees, distribution, personal tax on any profits. That £13 is nowhere near £13,000.”

“But back then, we just about made it work; we sold out, so it was fine. I wasn’t in it to make money - not losing money was the goal. Journalism paid my rent. Damnation was the overblown stamp collection I poured everything into.”

Then the day came. The queue down Oxford Road curled right around the block - “There’s a picture somewhere on the internet,” Gav laughs. “Those were a wee bit later, I think it was like half three, four o’clock with the first Damnation - it wasn’t quite 11am like we have now.” But he still remembers the doubt. “We’d sold the tickets, but is everybody just going to show up for Entombed later on tonight?” They didn’t. From the first crash of Dawn of Chaos and Allerjen, both stages were mobbed. “It’s always been that way, and it looks like it always will be.”

By the next morning, he was wandering Manchester “in an absolute daze.” “When you’re a promoter, it’s all fantasy football manager stuff - you’re sitting in your room sending offers to bands and booking toilets,” he says. “Then suddenly your team’s on the pitch at Wembley and the crowd are there.” The whole thing felt “like a fever dream… I was on cloud nine.”

Back then, there were no TikToks about the pizza queue or Facebook threads about toilets, just message boards full of people saying it was brilliant. “It was overwhelmingly positive from the start,” he says. “I remember heading back up the road in the minibus thinking, I’m going to do this again straight away.”

Two decades later, that glow hasn’t faded. “There are so many of those folk from the first year still here,” Gav says. “You see them in the crowd wearing those 2005 and 2006 shirts, all worn and grey now.” Some of those same faces are now behind the scenes too. “Whether it’s just people that came and eventually worked their way into some sort of like, ‘oh, I’ll help get the sandwiches ready,’ or ‘I’ll help out at the merch stall,’ they’re still here,” he says. The venues have grown - from Jilly’s 600-cap main room to a 6,000-cap arena - but the feeling hasn’t. “I’m still the PR and marketing guy, still the one doing tickets. We could get agencies now, but why? If it’s not broken, why fix it?”

He laughs when asked if he ever thought it’d last this long. “Not the first year, no. That first year was such a f**king whirlwind and such a lesson in how much I didn’t know.” By 2008, looking down from the balcony at four thousand people, he realised it had grown into something far beyond a hobby.

“Now, Damnation’s bigger than some small businesses with full-time staff,” he says, shaking his head. “There was so much chaos about that first festival. But you know what? Everyone remembers it really fondly. Everyone there, even the bands, enjoyed it, even with all the chaos. And as a first show to ever promote, I have to say, I'm pretty proud of it.”

“Because you guys came, we’ve had this snowball effect, and Damnation is now the biggest indoor metal festival in the world. Like, not just Europe anymore, in the world. And that’s because of them. Without the fans, you’re nothing. And that’s the truth.”

“And for those who have been with us over them 20 years especially, I just want to say, you're absolute legends.”

With its 20th Anniversary kicking off this weekend, Damantion is showing no signs of slowing down. Want to be in the mix of the mosh at the BEC Arena? Grab your last-minute tickets below now! Just remember your earplugs...

Buy tickets: