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!