hell bent for metal

This post is con­tin­u­ing on from The lost tweets of Wacken: Day One and sum­ma­rizes our Wacken expe­ri­ence via the Twit­ter sta­tus mes­sages (tweets) that I sent over SMS, but which never made it to my Twit­ter profile…

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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 12:17 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.