Cheese and crackers. Socks and sandals. Rock and wrestling. Some things just go together.
This weekend, our colossal new S2 Duo Extended Open, a double-headed beast with open ends, was out for the first time ever at a very drizzly Download Festival in Donington Park, housing Progress Wrestling’s WWF-style wrestling battles.
If you’ve followed rock, metal or basically any noisy guitar music over the last two decades or so, you’ll know that the only place to see the cream of the genre is Download Festival. Iron Maiden played the first day of the first ever Download in 2003, and since that first year the event has pretty much dominated the scene. This year, Slipknot, Muse and Kiss headed up the bill alongside such legends as Faith No More, Judas Priest and Marilyn Manson, to name but a few.
And, after all that music, we were up for a light spot of wrestling in the S2 Duo Extended. Progress Wrestling’s co-creator Jim Smallman describes it as “part punk gig, part away end at a football match”. If you managed to fight your way through the sea of angry people wearing devil-horns, you’d have seen brutal takedowns, cutting putdowns and a big fat dose of bravado – the perfect accompaniment to the rock and metal that sound-tracked the festival.
The incredibly efficient S2 Duo Extended is a European exclusive: nowhere else has the configuration been used before. It’s light to transport and thanks to our highly trained team, it can be put up in just one day and taken down in half.
And, with our bespoke concrete ballast blocks, you could say it’s rock solid: designed exclusively for Silver Stage, the ballasts raised the structure up for plenty of extra height above the wrestling ring.
Not bad, not bad at all. See you next year, Download!