Archive for February, 2009

No Wacken Festival for Brazil

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
Germany vs. Brazil - 2002 World Cup Final

Image by skell via Flickr

When we were at Wacken ‘08, the offi­cial news­pa­per had an arti­cle about the festival’s plans for extra-continental dom­i­na­tion and it quite clearly stated that Aus­tralia would be the first coun­try out­side of Ger­many to get it’s own Wacken-branded metal festival.

Shortly after we left, Wacken Rocks Brazil was announced, and once again us Aussies grum­bled about being left out.

Now it turns out the Brazil­ian fes­ti­val, sched­uled for May, has been post­poned. No doubt due to the GFCTM*.

Bug­ger, eh. This kind of thing sucks for every­one. Here’s hop­ing things pick up.

*Global Finan­cial Crisis

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Heaven, Hell and various states in between

Monday, February 9th, 2009
PERTH, AUSTRALIA - AUGUST 02: Ronnie James Di...

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Pretty big news, I think: Heaven and Hell, the ver­sion of Black Sab­bath with the one and only Ron­nie James Dio on vocals, has been announced for W:O:A 09.

This is excit­ing because:

  1. I’m a huge Ron­nie fan
  2. Nope, that’s the only reason

We saw Heaven and Hell when they played in Perth in 2007. Unfor­tu­nately I was a lit­tle late to buy tick­ets – like, a cou­ple of hours late – and all the good seats were taken. The organ­is­ers, for rea­sons known only to them, decided to replace what is nor­mally the stand­ing only area at the front of the stage with rows of seats. So of course, most of the peo­ple down the front stood up, fill­ing a quar­ter of the area, and the rest of use squinted from the back.

The other thing that sucked about that show was that Down played sup­port, so the first time I got to see a band I absolutely love, was from the bleach­ers while a bunch of senior cits snoozed at the front of the stage. For­tu­nately I got to see them in 2008 and they kicked arse.

So any­way, back to the story at hand: WACKEN! DIO! YEAH!

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