hell bent for metal

goat­lady and I have been attend­ing quite a few metal gigs lately, and I’ve noticed a dis­turb­ing trend. The band is on stage, they’re rock­ing the crowd, and the crowd is flash­ing the horns… but no, half of the peo­ple look like they are hold­ing fuck­ing crooked lit­tle stumps in the air.

God­damit, if you are going to flash the horns, HOLD YOUR FUCKING FINGERS STRAIGHT. Don’t give me this limp wristed, half bent elbow wave. Is your hand bro­ken? Do you have no mus­cle con­trol? Is your mas­cara run­ning into your eyes caus­ing you too much pain? Come on peo­ple… \m/

Ok, I’ve been very slack updat­ing *sigh*… but on the other hand, rather awe­some news that In Flames are going to be play­ing Wacken. We’ve been huge fans for a long time, and goat­lady was pre­dict­ing that they would most likely play this year, and here we are.

What is inter­est­ing, is that we’ve really been wait­ing ages to see these guys live, and they are play­ing the Sound­wave Fes­ti­val here in Feb­ru­ary, so we actu­ally get to see them twice. Rock on…

I try to read the Wacken forums every day to get any new snip­pets of infor­ma­tion… a recent post stated that the total tick­ets sold in the first four weeks was around 25,000! 10,000 of those sold in the first 24 hours of sales! That is an insane num­ber and given the shows capac­ity is 65,000, I am sure they will sell out very quickly. It’s not often you have a 20th birth­day after all… \m/

The sec­ond band announce­ment was made last week, and it is old school met­allers Cathe­dral. While I haven’t heard much of their stuff in the past, what I have heard, I like a lot. This is what I love about Wacken – see­ing bands you’ve heard of but not nec­es­sar­ily paid too much atten­tion to in the past. I’ve been lis­ten­ing to var­i­ous bits of Cathe­dral over the last week and I must say, I’m psy­ched to see them!

By miss­ing out on the last Wacken trip, I have to admit I was a bit shirty. How­ever, like an over-excited male dog, it can be fixed. It didn’t really take Kay and Dave long to per­suade me to throw my name in for next year’s trip, and I’m pretty happy I’ve decided to go. It will take a mir­a­cle to stop me this time, and with it being the 20th Anniver­sary I can’t help but think I’ve got an awe­some year to start. The big ques­tion is, who is gonna show? Iron Maiden were a huge act, being gods in Europe, but it’s that lit­tle tid­bit that has me think­ing, although I have my ideal bands to play, that may not line up with the Euro­pean fan­base, so, who is big in Europe?

To be hon­est, I have very lit­tle idea, hav­ing never been, so I’m going to have a cou­ple of pot­shots based on releases. Motor­head and AC/DC are both releas­ing mate­r­ial this year, as is Metal­lica. Although Metal­lica could be epic(depend­ing on new cd and god damn it bet­ter be good), Motor­head and AC/DC are mon­sters. AC/DC rarely set foot in Oz any­more so depend­ing on which leg of the world tour they are on, it might line up nicely. Motor­head are just Motor­head. Lemmy is God, that’s all I will say on the mat­ter. Of course, this is wish­ful think­ing, I might make some more edu­cated guesses later on, but with beer on the brain and metal in my heart, its just an awe­some time to be think­ing about this kinda stuff \m/

For any­one who would doubt I will make it all the way next year, I bet you one beer. Sign a com­ment, when I get back, you owe me a beer, if I don’t go, my shout. I’ll hon­our all drinks. Con­sider the gaunt­let laid down.

Just read the announce­ment that Girlschool, described in the press release on Blab­ber­mouth as “vet­eran British all-female hard rock band”, have been con­firmed for Wacken. This is pretty cool – a real piece of metal his­tory. Their gui­tarist Kelly John­son sadly passed away last year, and the only other thing I really know about them is that Lemmy said they kicked arse and could drink him under the table. Which is as good a rec­om­men­da­tion as any, right?

Wacken starts in 33 days. We leave for Europe in 15 days. ROCK.