Healing Howling fields

While I've seen quite a few punk acts at Glastonbury over the years (perhaps most memorably Fucked Up on the John Peel Stage in 2009), metal bands have very rarely featured on its extensive bills. Metallica's headlining slot in 2014 is the exception that proves the rule - but the fact is that they went down well, perhaps surprisingly so (especially given the pre-festival carping).

So it was laudable but not a complete gamble on the part of Nottingham-based metal label Earache to offer to curate a metal-centric stage for this year's event. The festival's organisers should be commended for acknowledging the lack of representation afforded to metal and taking them up on the offer, and the result - the Earache Express, a stage created out of a London Tube carriage in the Shangri-La area, which featured Heck, Extreme Noise Terror, Dead Kennedys and Ed Miliband's favourites Napalm Death - seems to have proved a real success.

Here's Earache's Tom Hadfield talking to ace Nottingham culture site/publication LeftLion before the festival about how it all took shape.