Meeting up early the second day of a festival with a hangover which could cover the city if it wasn’t cramped together inside a single skull is never a pretty sight.
Hence every festival should start the day out with a band which isn’t necessarily something you chose the festival for but still wouldn’t mind seeing as you’re here anyway, and they need to be ballsy and entertaining enough to get you back on your feet for another day.
At Copenhell, the band chosen for this task was Anvil…

…and Anvil was not going to let this one go with a lazy run-of-the-mill kind of concert!
“Are you ready to rock?! Are you ready to roll?!” Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow shouted in his usual manner into the guitars microphone, and so the show was on the road.
Kudlow, Glenn ‘Five’ Gyorffy and Robb Reiner all worked really hard, and of course had loads of fun, up on the stage; Reiner put all his power into bashing the drumskins, while still maintaining enough presence of mind to play around with the sticks when the time was right, Gyorffy was up to all his usual happy posing (and yes, we love posers, they’re much more interesting to watch than someone who looks at their own toes through the whole show), and finally ‘Lips’ made good of his name and spoke often between songs or whenever he had the chance. The crowd may have been a bit slow in the start, but when he brought up Christiania and spoke of how well he liked Denmark, the natives finally woke up and cheered him on.
From here on out everyone seemed happy to join in the fun that was Anvil…

Kudlow gladly introduced many of the songs to us; Juggernaut Of Justice was called; ”…song from the new album. Well, it’s been out a couple of years but what the hell?!”, Winged Assassin was according to the motor-mouth frontman some kind of love-song and Thumb Hang was dedicated, with anecdotes about personal memories, to the late king of heavy metal, Ronnie James Dio.
But Kudlow could do other things than just talk fast and play heavy metal; why, at one point his hand went behind his back and when it came back it held a large dildo (I’m hoping it came from his back pocket (of his pants)) which he subsequently used to play a solo with. After this he got a mischievous grin on his face, and stuck the thing in the ear of one of the security in front of the stage. A big hand must go out to the security man here, as he only smiled, and took it for what it was without getting cranky as many of his profession would do.

Still, the rocking out was the most important part, and this was something Anvil excelled at. They were really good at firing up the heavy-headed crowd, and as it turned out, they were also exactly what the doctor ordered for my own hang-over. Why, by the end of the show I had accumulated so much energy it needed an outburst of some sort, and that’s what it got in the smash&bash garden opposite the main stage.
So, to the tones of Metal On Metal, I could be found happily swinging an oversized metal-pipe at a defenceless Volkswagen. In what better way could this thrash classic possibly be enjoyed?

Setlist (incomplete):

666
Juggernaut Of Justice
Winged Assassin
On Fire
This Is Thirteen
Thumb Hang
Metal On Metal