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.

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Who’s it gonna be?

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.

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First announcement and tickets on sale: next week

At Wacken this year we met a lot of people who come to WOA every year. In fact, the oft-asked question when meeting someone was likely to be “how many have you been to?”.

Originally the plan had been that this would be a one-off trip. While staying in Poland we realised we HAD to come back to visit again soon – the plan was then revised to 2010 (just enough time for the budget to recover). However, since being back at home, it’s become increasingly obvious that 2010 is not nearly soon enough. 2009 is the 20th anniversary and while no bands have been announced, a special limited initial allotment of tickets are already sold out.

This weekend, Dave and I made it concrete: we’re going to WOA 2009. Saturday night, after a few drinks with Al, he confirmed that he’s in.

So it’s official: let the countdown begin. WOA 2009, here we come!

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WOA 2009? Yes please!

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.

Post from: hell bent for wacken '08

The lost tweets of Wacken: Day Two

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!

Post from: hell bent for wacken '08

The lost tweets of Wacken: Day One

We went to the WOA Countdown Party at the Ballroom, Hamburg on Monday night and as you can see from the photo above, friends were made and beer was drunk (who was drunk? Certainly not I, nooooo…).

Today we’re catching the train down to Wacken and will pitch our tent in the mud (it’s raining, of course). It’s on!

Post from: hell bent for wacken '08

woa: here we come

Decibel magazine’s blog has some timely death metal tourism advice for us in Adam (Hate) Lists Top 5 Things To Do In Poland.

1. While we won’t be actually doing suggestion Number 1 – Play Polish death metal – we’ll certainly be trying to find some local stuff to check out in the numerous bars of Krakow.
2. Number 2 is Fight Christianity – well, that’s all in a day’s work, right?
3. Next up is Climb Tatra Mountains – that one is on our todo list also.
4. Spend time by the Baltic Sea eating pierogi and kilbasa – we’ll be doing a variation of this one, but just in Krakow. I for one intend to consume pierogi pretty much for breakfast, lunch and dinner, although Dave can keep the kilbasa (sausage) all for himself.
5. As for number 5, Visit Białowieża – that will be a little difficult in our limited time. This forest, home of the rare Polish bison “zubr”, is quite some way away from where we’ll be. But Dave recently finished off some Polish bison vodka – complete with prairie grass stalk in the bottle – and we’re both pretty amazed by the Zubr web site (super-cute!) so that will have to be close enough.

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So what are we going to do in Poland?

The German people are known for their efficiency, organisation and industriousness. Is it any wonder then, that for the trifling fee of 120 euros, you can have your very own lockable portable toilet for the duration of the Wacken Open Air festival, positioned near your allocated camping area, cleaned daily with military precision by sanitation crews? A small price to pay for convenience and sanitation, methinks.

Of course, we have put our names down for one. We trust it will be of a higher calibre than the image above.

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A toilet of our very own

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.

Post from: hell bent for wacken '08

Girlschool oldschool

I’m pretty happy about this. Udo Dirkschneider, the crazy little man out the front of German power-metallers Accept and now U.D.O. is going to be doing a guest spot with Lordi at Wacken.

Just one song, mind you, but still… Udo is a bit of a legend as far as I’m concerned. Balls to the Wall rates as one of my all time favourite songs from my childhood (I tried to slip it into the playlist at Gossy’s wedding, but the only 80’s power metal that made it past the DJ was Judas Priest’s Turbo Lover).

We’re a man down – Al will no longer be joining our epic journey of epicness – but we’ll raise the horns for our fallen comrades and battle on, only 6 weeks til Wacken itself and a shade less than 4 weeks until we leave Australia. Wootage!

Post from: hell bent for wacken '08

Udo! At Wacken!