hell bent for metal

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!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 4:45 am and is filed under festival. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.