With a festival the magnitude of Wacken, there are bound to be quite a few bands I’m not familiar with. Looking over the current lineup, I can see just under half the bands I have heard, a few more I have ‘heard of’ and the rest are new to me. And by new, I mean, have probably been around for ages. To remedy this I need to visit a hell of a lot of myspace pages. I’m not expecting to start learning lyrics by heart, but it will give me an idea of who plays what so I know which bands to drink during and which ones to watch, or in some cases, both may be appropriate.

So here we go. Months of strenuous liver conditioning and extensive heavy metal analysis await. It will be tough, it will be loud, and it will be awesome \m/