Blasting the North in August.
Such is the motto of Wacken Open Air (estd. 1990) which is pretty much the best metal festival
ever, or at least one of the largest and most highly regarded (though Dynamo in Eindhoven and
various Scandinavian ones can match it for atmosphere and suchlike, WOA trumps them all with
sheer size.) Seriously. Download, O2 Wireless, Bloodstock, all can go and take a long walk
off a short pier for all I care. Wacken has it all, the best bands, the lack of corpo-whoredom
(Download this year had one stage sponsored by a washed up shit-sheet and the other by
whiny emo tossbags, see what I mean?) the cheap local German beer, the greatness that
is the Metal Market, the incredible atmosphere, the huge crowds of on average 35,000 people from
all over the world, though often this is a conservative estimate, and above all, it's really
cheap compared to what one might expect to pay were it held in Britain, even if you factor in the
costs of getting there. Then there's the whole adventure side of it, navigating across Europe to
a muddy field outside a small sleepy town about halfway between Hamburg and the Danish border,
living in a tent and not washing for days just to see some crazy Norwegians or
batshit insane Finns thrash out a few songs. It's truly excellent and, in the
year of our Lord 2006, I was there.
I won't bore you to death with how I got there, suffice to say that by the wonders of the
160mph Eurostar, and fare-dodging on a sleeper service to Hamburg (if you're an employee of
Deutsche Bahn, don't get your knickers in a twist, I can explain...) I arrived at Wacken
(population: 1,750) on a local stopping service and a crowded bus, and, having picked up my
reserved tickets from a supermarket in the town, I tramped across to the festival site
(population: about 80,000 this year, I was told at the time, though later estimates put it at
about 62,000). I had thought I'd been real smart by turning up a day in advance to bag the best
camping spot, but so had everyone else and as such my tent was almost at the far edge of the
campsite, next to a trio of German girls with dyed hair, one red, one green, and one blue, in a
dark green tent with some Norse runes emblazoned on a banner on one side. Having done that, I
then had a wander round the site just to get my bearings. Here follows some of the more
interesting parts in the area I found:
The Beer Garden. Without a shadow of a doubt the most important part of the
festival site, they served a variety of alcoholic beverages, mainly local beers, ranging from the
ineffably cheap but Stella Artois-like Holsten at €1.50 a can, to some more
expensive but nicer tasting items. The best offer was a plastic stein of something called
Franziskaner Weissbier, which was plenty for your money, lasted a long time, and when one of the
spontaneous Mexican-wave-like shouts of "WACKEN!" went round the area, accompanied by many, many
pairs of devil horns, it had a good heft to it. Also, just wandering about here meant that I,
who went alone, could get to talk to some fellow Englanders, my German being pretty much out of
an Audi handbook. I met up with one group from the town of Weymouth and ended up chanting in
a most politically incorrect manner with the best of them:
We're the Wackeneers,
We like drinking beers,
Rape and pillage, rape and pillage
Kill all the fucking queers!
Of course, as the pilsener flowed more this was inverted to "We like fucking
queers" and "drink all the fucking beers" and this then segued into that
rugby-club favourite, "For we're all queers together!" There was also a local brand
of beer, Wacken Beer, which came in bottles with the festival bull's head logo on it and the
tag, "Skoal Metalheadz!" which I didn't taste but was probably repackaged Holsten
sold at twice the price. A small stand near the beer garden sold soft drinks as well as sealed
bags of crushed ice which, in the sort of insanely hot weather we had during the latter half of
the festival, were a necessity.
The various food stalls. Overpriced and toxic looking usually, especially the kebab
vans. I went for the bratwurst in buns for the most part, or the grilled steak, because they
looked the least likely to demonstrate to me whether my boots were leaking. There was also pizza,
and something called "knobi-brot" which sounds a) rude, and b) unidentifiable. However, they had
more potential customers than the population of the terrorist capital of the UK
nearby so the stall operators could afford to rip them off and poison them because the punters
had nowhere else to go really. That being said, I did try the steak in a bun and felt my left arm
twinge in a worrying manner with the huge amounts of fat stuck to the bit of meat I was
consuming. This, and the sausages in buns, became a sort of staple festival diet for me. Even
more strangely though, I actually lost weight, because at the end my trousers were falling
down...
The Metal-Market. This was a number of covered stalls at one side of the festival
site, at which various suitable odds and ends could be purchased. These included loads of
underground CDs, band shirts, patches, spiky bracelers and gauntlets, ornate leather jewelry,
corsetry, flappy dresses, and other gothwear for the ladies who were into that kind of thing
(though metal fashion is, I must say, very androgyne, there were several nicely gothed-up ladies
about, most of the time on the arms of huge 18-stone Germans), black jeans, black leather
trousers, black latex trousers, rings and things, and other such oddments. One stall of
particular note was the Viking Stall, at which one could buy chainmail shirts, helmets, mead,
drinking horns, Thor's Hammer pendants, and T-shirts with slogans like "Odin statt
Jesus" or "My God is Odin, My Lord is Me." This is apparently a regular
fixture at WOA and the drinking horns were certainly a fast seller, mainly because you could
decant a surprising amount of beer into them.
I did, however, find some of the wares on offer at the Metal Market a little bit ironic,
though. One stall specialised in black metal from Poland, the Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, a not
inconsiderable portion of which was apparently produced by people of a, well, rather fascistic
political bent and some even on record labels associated with white supremacist movements. Now
although I'm perfectly capable of separating peoples' works from their political views - and many
so-called "NSBM" acts have lyrical themes about pre-Christian traditions in their home countries
and other forms of National Romanticism rather than going on about why Jews and blacks need death, I found it a wee bit creepy that not a few yards away
from a banner bearing a crossed-out swastika and the legend "Metalheadz Against
Racism" you could, in effect, pay off the pension funds of openly racist organisations.
Then again, a lot of people will buy stuff by Graveland, Temnozor, Nokturnal Mortum, et al,
just for the music. Which is, of course, why people come to WOA and the stall owners probably
realised that.
The WOA Soccercup. This event usually takes place the day before the festivities
start in earnest. Basically you sign up on the Internet with your team of five before coming and
play some football against other metalheads. Note that this is basically an excuse to get drunk
and streak across the pitch. It's all good clean fun as well. The standard of play on offer
wasn't great, although one really quite fat guy with a beard down to his crotch seemed a
particularly talented player and one who was quite quick on his feet, or maybe that was because
he was less/more ratted than the rest.
The toilet and shower facilities. I deem these worthy of note because, well, even
we big hairy metalheads need to answer a call of nature at times. Basically, these are typical
festival standard, with portaloos that resemble someone's science project and communal showers in
a Nissen hut. There are some proper toilets which flush and which are cleaned properly, but these
cost 50 Euro-cents to enter. Basically you're better off going in a hedge, and only using proper
toilets when you need to offload those dodgy burgers. Imodium tablets are also a good idea.
The campsite. Don't expect to do much sleeping here, the party goes on pretty much
in some form or another twenty-four hours a day. If ever you get bored, just wander about a bit
and you'll probably find someone interesting to talk to, even in the dead of night. The campsite
is all open and has proper roads and as far as I know nobody got robbed or beaten up. Well, there
were German police on ATVs tooling about a bit, though mainly to curb people getting aggressive
while drunk and telling them they've had enough. Lots of people had brought stereos and blasted
their CDs out with their friends hanging about and inviting others in to join them. It is
exceedingly friendly, almost disturbingly so - for instance, some Germans gave me two cans of
Holsten simply because I had a Slayer T-shirt on.
There's a spot of fratboy humour about but it should be taken in the spirit in which it's
intended. Don't go expecting a Spring Break style syphilis-swapping party, or voluminous amounts
of shagging at all really for that matter (the couple who were thusly engaged up against the side
of their camper van while Cradle of Filth's song "Coffin Fodder" blared out from within are
excepted.) Basically the fratboyishness is reserved to holding up the bottoms of wholesale outers
of pilsener with "Titten fur Bier" scrawled on them in permanent marker - and, just before
someone starts claiming that we're all a load of sexist dinosaurs, a bunch of female metalheads
had a similar device in another area of the campsite saying "Bier fur Titten." They were
evidently deemed quite attractive because they had several crumpled cans about the base of their
deckchairs. Another individual had cut out several pairs of circles in a roll-up type mattress,
and marked them "zu Keine," "Kompakt," "Handvoll," "Standart," "Grosse," and "Hilf mir!" and
nobody batted an eyelid really to this blatant objectification of the female form. Though to be
fair, there was probably a female counterpart with a "Dick-o-Meter" made similarly. It's all in
good humour anyhow; besides, true dyed-in-the-wool Bro-Magnons aren't into proper metal and would
not be seen dead with Wackeneers in any case. Not cool enough.
Something that did worry me about the campsite was that it was very tightly packed in when I
was there this year. It was so tightly packed in that some Danes in an Astra accidentally backed
into the corner of my tent while I was inside and bent one of the poles out of shape a bit. I
was, of course, unhurt, but it did very much worry me. Early arrival is highly recommended in
order to find space and to avoid incidents like this.
The stages themselves. There are four stages at Wacken; the two main ones are next
door to each other with fifty-foot stacks of speakers up each side and heaps of Marshall amps in
near-permanent residence (in the world of metal, is there any other sort of amp?) and a video
screen between them which showed various information about who was next, and a few adverts,
mainly for the documentary film Metal: A Headbanger's Journey which featured Wacken
prominently. These two were called the "True Metal Stage" and the "Black Stage" and are of about
the same size, possibly the True Metal Stage being a wee bit bigger (though Emperor, the band
that many people I spoke to had singled out as one to see in 2006, were on the Black Stage.) The
third stage, the Party Stage, is off to one side and is about half the size of the main two
stages. The fourth stage is very small and is covered by a tent with its own beer sub-tent
inside. This, the "Wet Stage," is where the Metal Karaoke was held and the lesser-known acts
performed. Yes, Metal Karaoke, I shit you not.
To avoid conflicts of sound and other such messes, acts were scheduled alternately between the
True Stage and the Black and Party stages, so that when, for example, Danko Jones was playing
on the True Stage, Opeth and Soilwork would be setting up on the Black and Party stages
respectively. The plus side of this arrangement is that it's possible to have more bands perform
in the three days of the main festivities, but on the minus side, sometimes one has to make some
pretty tough choices about who to see next. The Wet Stage simply played all the time, it was
small and far away enough to keep itself to itself and it didn't really interfere with other
bands playing on the main stages.
Advertising on stage is limited to the equipment used by the bands, the ubiquitous Marshall
amplifier brand and the film "Metal: A Headbanger's Journey." It's quite on the cards that that
is the way it will remain for the foreseeable future; WOA has lasted 17 years without being
bought out by some major media conglomerate (Download, for instance, at Donington Park in the UK,
is run by Live Nation, a subsidiary of Clear Channel) and its organisers and adherents would
most like it to stay that way. After all, with no sponsors or advertisers to tiptoe round, the
organisers can ensure that the acts they book are those that the festival-goers want to see. And
the acts that the festival-goers want to see are all well regarded metal bands, all very
different styles, be they traditional metal, death metal,
melodic death metal, female fronted death metal, black metal,
symphonic black metal, black metal/humppa crossover, power
metal, cheeseball Tolkien-obsessed power metal, folksy metal which
results in not so much circle pits as circle dancing, Viking metal, and many, many
more. They do tend to steer clear of nu-metal or things whose genres involve the word "core"
though (other than grindcore, as Napalm Death have played there I believe.) Of course, not
every artist who played there was metal per se, in 2006 the Canadian alt rock artist Danko
Jones played on the True Stage, and the German artist Mambo Kurt, who specialises in covering
all manner of songs of all types in a bossa nova or polka style on a Hammond Organ played on
the Wet Stage.
Indeed, WOA has grown from being a small local event as it was in 1990 to a major
international headbanging happening; practically every band of any significant stature has played
there, and even some less well known performers as well. It's also comparatively cheap, as
festivals go, well, in terms of ticket prices it is; in 2006, a full three-day ticket would have
set you back merely €79, which is about sixty quid in real money. Compare this with certain other
festivals I can name, which command ticket prices over twice that, and the money you can save can
go towards getting there and back and, of course, that lovely, lovely Wacken Beer. Also some
people have been there pretty much since day one; indeed, my trip there in 2006 was the first
time I had ever been and I did notice there was a wee bit of a dick-waving contest to see who
could produce the oldest official WOA shirt or badge or whatever (a thirty-something French bloke
"won" if you must know, with a 1996 shirt.) It's little things like this that make WOA such an
unmissable event, even if you're not into psychotic distortion pedals and stacks of Marshall
amps.
One should be warned, though, that the weather can be rather changeable up between Hamburg
and the Danish border and the combination of rainy spells during the first half of the week and
oppressive sunlight during the second half of 2006's event meant that I went off home with half of Schleswig-Holstein stuck to me in the form of tiny little dust particles (via a
night camped out on the floor of Bruxelles-Midi station after having been direly warned by a
pair of Belgians who looked like Jay and Silent Bob that I'd be pickpocketed and arseraped by
Moroccan cottaging enthusiasts within minutes, or something like that, but that's another
story)
which appeared literally everywhere. So when I got back home to loserville where I
lived I was tired and filthy but I didn't care, it was that great. Beer, tasty music, intelligent
conversation (well, conversation not about vapid zelebrities or Cristiano
Ronaldo anyhow)... what more could I have wanted?
I'm definitely going again next year.