hell bent for metal

Hey guys, on the 18th of August you said tick­ets would go on sale “in the next week”. It’s been 13 days now and poor Met­al­beast is check­ing your site reli­giously every hour. For the sake of our band­width and yours, please announce 2009 tick­ets soon.

Sin­cerely,

The Goat­lady.

Accord­ing to a news item on the Wacken site, pre-sale of nor­mal “all in” tick­ets start next week. There will also be a band announcement.

Excited, much?

Which bands could pos­si­bly top the 2008 lineup? This is the 20th anniver­sary year – no doubt they’ll want to make it spe­cial. Iron Maiden was a pretty big deal (even though I have issues with that choice which I have not blogged yet but will even­tu­ally). Some peo­ple are say­ing Judas Priest. Some are say­ing Saxon (who have hardly missed a year in the entire festival’s his­tory). Some peo­ple are say­ing Manowar but I can’t tell if they’re jok­ing or not – because I’m not directly Ger­man by birth, I have no com­pre­hen­sion of Manowar. (Seri­ously, I don’t get it. If any­one can explain, please do).

Who­ever they have, I really am not con­cerned – we’ll be there fly­ing the Aussie flag regardless.

This post is con­tin­u­ing on from The lost tweets of Wacken: Day One and sum­ma­rizes our Wacken expe­ri­ence via the Twit­ter sta­tus mes­sages (tweets) that I sent over SMS, but which never made it to my Twit­ter profile…

This day started off with a pithy piece of commentary:

Inter­est­ing obser­va­tion: a 2 per­son tent is big enough to fit 2 per­sons, but not their back­packs and var­i­ous other crap at the same time

The sad truth of our bar­gain AUD $29.95 Ana­conda tent was brought home to us with extreme cru­elty. We “slept” wedged into the tent, poor Dave couldn’t stretch his legs all the way out. We had to keep our heads away from the very edge of the tent to pro­tect our del­i­cate skulls from the boots of the numer­ous drunk and stum­bling passers-by, and with our packs half open and our ice bucket in one cor­ner and boots in another, there was not much space at all. So much for “you only sleep a cou­ple of hours in it any­way”. Next time: a large tent is a necessity.

Dis­cov­ered a Wacken secret – the vil­lage pub does an excel­lent buf­fet breakfast!

This was a gem of a find. By about 7am it was too hot inside the tent to stay in there, so we put on fresh T-shirts, stepped around and over var­i­ous bod­ies lit­ter­ing the ground, and wan­dered down to the vil­lage in search of breakfast.

The €7.50 “hang­over” break­fast in someone’s makeshift beer gar­den didn’t look all that good to the non-meat-eater in our party (me) so we kept walk­ing fur­ther into the vil­lage to check out the other options. Right at the end, as we were turn­ing around to go back, I noticed peo­ple going into the pub. There were no signs but we went in any­way and were sur­prised to find a con­ti­nen­tal break­fast buf­fet for €8.50 with fried eggs, scram­bled eggs, var­i­ous cold meats and cheeses, cereal, yogurt and coffee.

Using the raw mate­ri­als sup­plied, I was able to con­struct a mon­ster fried egg sand­wich which, with the Euro per­co­lated cof­fee with cream, was exactly what I needed to kick the day off.

Met some Aussies, We’re a fuck­ing awe­some coun­try, truly

After com­ing back from break­fast, we’d stopped at the camp­ing store to buy mats to put under our sleep­ing bags (I tell ya, we were such camp­ing n00bs), €9 fold­ing chairs and sun­screen, we walked around the metal mar­ket and main Wacken area for a while, check­ing things out as the first band wasn’t on until 4pm. I think this was when I bought some shorts from an army sur­plus store and Dave cut the legs off one of his pairs of jeans.

While wait­ing for me to get out of a toi­let queue, Dave spot­ted a guy wear­ing an Aussie flag and went up to have a chat. Turns out it was a dude from Perth who was there with his girl­friend, and then a guy from Queens­land spot­ted the flag and came over to say hello as well. I emerged from the facil­i­ties and found them all chat­ting, com­par­ing notes on the Euro­pean expe­ri­ence: a) no one wears sun­glasses or hats despite the quite vicious heat (the four of us were all sport­ing both), and b) the beer is not nearly cold enough. Really cool people.

At 2pm we were hop­ing to meet up with some peo­ple Dave had been talk­ing to on the Wacken forums, but unfor­tu­nately the time and/or loca­tion must have got mixed up because the only per­son we could find was:

crazy drunk Dutch guy demands “you must be kiss my tshirt”. Um, nooooo…

The time for music was approach­ing so my next tweet was:

the Wacken stages are mas­sive… secu­rity checks to get into the stage area are ful­lon… Girlschool on now

The secu­rity checks to get into the main arena area involved full pat-downs, wrist­band checks and bag searches. My one litre water bot­tle had to be binned (so I emp­tied it over my head – did I men­tion it was hell­ishly hot and quite humid?) – no plas­tic con­tain­ers allowed. Arena drinks were only served in Wacken beakers (€1 deposit) or plas­tic steins (€4 deposit).

Lis­ten­ing to Nashville Pussy and wish­ing the freak­ing sun would go down. 31°C in Ger­many today

Nashville Pussy were a fun band, but holy hell the heat was get­ting to us. Yes that’s right – two Aus­tralians – and the heat was get­ting to us. I think I can explain it like this: we were unpre­pared for those kinds of tem­per­a­tures, com­ing from the Aus­tralian win­ter and wear­ing our go-anywhere cargo pants and Doc Martens as we were. Per­son­ally I had looked at the weather reports lead­ing up to the fes­ti­val and was expect­ing tem­per­a­tures in the mid-twenties. Also, unlike Aus­tralian fes­ti­vals like the Big Day Out, there was no ready sup­ply of free water. You could buy glasses of sparkling min­eral water in the arena or bot­tles of water from the super­mar­ket, but keep­ing every­one con­tin­u­ally hydrated was not a focus for the organ­is­ers. And despite what you may think, con­tin­ual hydra­tion is just as nec­es­sary at 31° as it is at 38°.

Any­way, enough whin­ing from me… next tweet up:

Nashville Pussy cov­ered Rose Tattoo’s Rock n’ Roll Out­law – cool! Now lis­ten­ing to Air­bourne from a dis­tance (i.e. deck chairs out­side tent)

Nashville Pussy were very cool, and that’s my favourite Rose Tat­too song, although the band couldn’t remem­ber the words and just sang the first verse three times – very rock n’ roll I guess. Air­bourne are a lit­tle bit too much like early AC/DC for me (that is, I love AC/DC so would rather lis­ten to the orig­i­nal), so we were con­tent to lis­ten from the campsite.

Crazy bloody Iron Maiden fans are lined up for van­tage points with over an hour and a half still to go. Watch­ing Leaves Eyes – opera metal

The first night was Iron Maiden night. Pretty much every­one was excited except for us. Leaves Eyes were not my kind of thing (too much screech­ing), although Dave was impressed.

This was actu­ally my last tweet for the day. I think I was con­cerned about my phone credit run­ning out. At any rate, Iron Maiden were on and not being big Maiden fans, Dave and I took advan­tage of the fact that almost every­one was watch­ing them to go and have a shower. Only a hand­ful of peo­ple were around – there was only one other per­son in the women’s shower while I was there (a goth chick going through her beauty rou­tine, who was apply­ing face cream when I arrived, and was only just apply­ing the first lay­ers of corpse paint when I left).

After fresh­en­ing up – which felt fan­tas­tic — we walked around the arena area and were amazed at the num­ber of peo­ple watch­ing Maiden, either directly or via one of the three huge screens show­ing the action. They

did sound pretty good, although some things that were said and shown were a bit dumb, in my opin­ion – but that’s another post.

So that was the end of Day 1. Stay tuned for the next excit­ing episode of… The Lost Tweets of Wacken.

I’m a fan and reg­u­lar user of the Twit­ter online ser­vice. If you don’t know what Twit­ter is, it’s basi­cally a way to pub­lish 140 char­ac­ter “sta­tus mes­sages” which are dis­trib­uted to your group of Twit­ter friends and asso­ciates. Some peo­ple call it microblog­ging, but I find it’s just a nice way to keep in touch with peo­ple I like or admire on a more inti­mate level than would oth­er­wise be possible.

Twit­ter can be done over the web, by using a num­ber of spe­cialised clients, or over SMS – the text mes­sage option being per­fect for when you’re on the road and internet-disadvantaged, as we would obvi­ously be at Wacken.

When we got to Ham­burg, I bought a new Voda­phone pre­paid SIM card and set up my new num­ber with Twit­ter from the hotel wire­less inter­net. Even though I was oper­at­ing under an extreme hang­over, it all went through suc­cess­fully and I got the con­fir­ma­tion SMS from Twit­ter to say it was all good to go. I even charged up with an extra 15 euros of credit so I could do some heavy duty metal twit­terin’ from the Fes­ti­val. Game on!

I pro­ceeded to reli­giously send 6–12 text mes­sages each day out­lin­ing what I was doing and the bands I was seeing.

When we arrived back in Ham­burg and plugged back into the grid, not a sin­gle mes­sage had made it through. Foiled by the fail whale, as one of my twits (Twit­ter friends) sug­gested – to say that Twit­ter was not known for reli­a­bil­ity would be some­what of an understatement.

How­ever, thanks to the mir­a­cle of the Sent Mes­sages folder, I am able to retrieve those tweets and present them here, with anno­ta­tion, for your amuse­ment. May I present: the Lost Tweets of Wacken (with punc­tu­a­tion added and typos fixed).

At Wacken. Chez Starfish has been erected and I have a Wacken beer. It’s hot as hell but this is awesome.

That one’s pretty self explana­tory. We arrived on the train with the help of two Eng­lish met­al­heads, one of whom spoke enough Ger­man to work out the sys­tem, but we were much much much later than orig­i­nally planned. We met up with Stu­art and Nicola, the awe­some peo­ple we’d met at the Ball­room in Ham­burg two nights pre­vi­ous. They had an excel­lent camp­ing spot in area A, and they’d saved a spot for us, which was for­tu­nate because the poten­tial dif­fi­culty and incon­ve­nience of being camped two kilo­me­tres away didn’t really strike me until we were there. We had a laugh, put up our tent and cel­e­brated with a Wacken-branded beer (which tasted sus­pi­ciously like Emu Bitter).

A spe­cial mes­sage up next:

This is truly metal fuck­ing mecca \m/

This was sent when we started walk­ing around, and pos­si­bly after we’d dis­cov­ered the metal market.

The per­fect metal girl­friend – Nic is sit­ting out­side the tent sewing new patches on Stuart’s jacket.

She cracked me up with this. I didn’t bring makeup or jew­ellery or even much in the way of toi­letries – noth­ing except cargo pants, tshirts, under­wear, my one pair of Docs and a tooth­brush – yet here she was, so pre­pared she had a bloody sewing kit. Impressive.

The next tweet was after we’d been for a walk to the vil­lage to buy beer and deck chairs.

Sit­ting in the late after­noon sun, on our €9 fold­ing chairs, enjoy­ing a beer or two out­side our tent… the Wacken experience.

It was still hot, but it was pleas­ant. I then started to get a nag­ging feel­ing that some­thing wasn’t quite right:

Three beers in. Dave is lag­ging… and Twit­ter is not send­ing me any SMS. Bastard.

That should have been a warn­ing. At the stage though, I assumed my mes­sages were get­ting out even though none were get­ting in.

Next up a spe­cial mes­sage for our absent comrade…

ffs @charp should be here… this is the awse

Sorry mate, but it WAS.

About to go watch a Metal­lica cover band… Metakilla roflmao

Which we did, after hav­ing some din­ner (a kebab for me, some kind of meat thing for Dave). We then tried to com­pre­hend Mambo Kurt, a Ger­man play­ing metal cov­ers on the organ, but not being com­pletely pissed we were unable to see the point. The main arena was fenced off, but we did nosy parker what they were doing out there which was pretty interesting:

Watch­ing the stages being set up for the offi­cial start of the Fes­ti­val tomor­row… this is going to be cool

And then a final tweet for the evening:

Heavy metal karaoke hahaha omg this is hilar­i­ously awesome

Which would prob­a­bly do with some expla­na­tion. Karaoke it was, but with a live band and two singers who ran the show and filled in har­monies. Lyrics were on a mas­sive pro­jec­tion board behind the stage so every­one could sing along – and sing they did. What really struck me though was that there were prob­a­bly well over 5000 peo­ple watch­ing – there were almost more peo­ple watch­ing metal karaoke at Wacken than turned up to see Slayer play in Perth.

At some point we crawled back to our camp site and tried to get some sleep. Stay tuned for Day 2!