I suppose you could more or less call the Magic Circle Festival a Manowar Festival. After all, Joey DeMaio (bass, Manowar) is the president of Magic Circle Music, and it is Manowar which have been the main attraction both years. This year they were playing two full sets, two evenings in a row. The first evening they played their three first albums in their entirety, and the second evening they played the next three albums, also in their entirety.

Other than Manowar, the festival was visited by many of the biggest names of classic rock and metal, e.g. Alice Cooper, Doro and W.A.S.P. to name but a few. It has, as of yet, not a very varied style in the billing, but Joey has said that they are interested in bringing anything in which the fans want to hear, so don't be shy to contact them if you have any good ideas.

The festival has been, for the two years it's been around, located near the small town of Bad Arolsen, which is located pretty much in the middle of Germany, close to Kassel. This, however, is not necessarily a permanent solution as Joey has mentioned an interest in taking the MCF on the road, as long as there will be no compromise in quality.
After what I've heard, there were about 2o ooo visitors this year, but the area is big, with rich possibilities of expanding.

Also displayed at this year's festival was the all new guitar brand "MC Guitars". So far there are three different models - The Heretic and The Impaler both designed by Karl Logan (Manowar), and The Demonwing by Joe Stump (Holyhell).

Thursday:

Sadly, we missed out on all of the Wednesday's opening festivities, since we were driving from Slovenia that day, but we were informed by a couple of friends that it had been a good day.
Manowar had played four songs for their open soundcheck, and the burning of the Viking ship after Eric (Adams, Manowar) had shot an arrow of fire at it, had been cool to witness, although it had burnt rather quickly to the ground.

We arrived in the early afternoon, and were amazingly enough able to find a spot very close to the entrance. The first thing we did was to go and get our wrist-bands in the ticket container, where we were kindly greeted by a Swedish woman. Imagine our surprise, driving half-way through Germany, only to be received by a fellow Swede!
After this we decided to chill out with some good friends and beer at the camp. This meant we missed Benedictum, who started playing half an hour before they were set to go on.
We chose to go look for the press area, and just take the scenes of the place in before MSG. The guards were kind, and as helpful as they could be, sadly almost none of them had heard anything about a press area.
Finally, with the help of a hand-out map, we were able to find our way though. Here we accidentally ran into Alice Cooper, and strongly thought about falling to our knees before him, saying "We're not worthy, we're not worthy!" Luckily, we were as of yet not drunk enough to go through with the plan, and he has probably had this happen to him a few times already.

We first entered the festival area while MSG were playing, and only saw the end of the set. We did manage to hear the classic Doctor Doctor though.
Here we tried to get some food, but even though the clock was well past 7 p.m., the food stands hadn't really opened yet, and the only thing to get was a frozen pizza, which took some 20+ minutes to get warm.

While waiting for Ted Nugent to get ready, we by chance ran into Mark Osegueda (Death Angel) in the crowd, and he informed us that they had been recently added to the billing, and were going to play late at night in the Event Hall. This was fantastic news, and they quickly fell into second place of bands I was looking forward to see at this festival.

After Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper entered the Main stage as headlining act of the day, and gave us a well rehearsed show, which was a good way to end this part of the night.
We went to get something to eat and drink, and heard a bit of the Battle Of The Bands competition that had started in the Event Hall. Although we tried as hard we possibly could, after a while we had to admit to ourselves that there was no chance of either one of us being able to stay awake until Death Angel would take the stage, so with much regret about this, we packed it in for the night.

Friday:

The day started out with a very comfortable weather. The skies were grey, and a small breeze was blowing. It was a perfect combination, not too warm, but not raining either.
Again we suffered under the late opening of the food tents; no matter where we went, all we heard was "Come back in a couple of hours", and this was a long time after the festival area had opened.

The first band we chose to see was Hamburg's new pride, Stormwarrior, whose audience got the day's first taste of rain.
After this came Jack Starr's Burning Starr, which we only got to see a bit of the start from, since we had to hurry over to the big press conference. There were several bands and artists present, but most of the questions were still directed to Joey DeMaio and Manowar. Here we all got confirmation on the rumor that had been circulating for a while, about Whitesnake and Def Leppard dropping out of the festival, and we were told that the Magic Circle Festival was prepared to give some compensation to those who had come for these two bands.
We were also informed that Majesty, who were supposed to play the next day, had ceased to exist. However, they would continue under a new name - Metal Force - and would be playing under this title the next night. Strange name change in my opinion, sounds like something a 13-14 year old might think was cool. Their decision though.
When we came back from this we saw the end of Beloved Enemy's show. Actually Brazen Abbot should have played here, but we never did find out about the reason as to why they had changed.

After this Doro gave an impressive show, followed by a short announcement; "We've got some good news and some bad news. First the bad news; it will only last for ten minutes. Now for the good news; free beer for everyone!" You can imagine the stampede towards the bar tents this created. Nevertheless, we managed to get our share, even though we didn't even rush over there.

To a certain disadvantage for W.A.S.P., the festival chose to make the public announcement about Whitesnake and Def Leppard dropping out right before they went on. Even though the management for the festival apologized sincerely, and told people about the possibility to get some form of compensation for it, this created a minor outrage in the audience. This quickly subsided as soon as Blackie and the rest of the band took the stage though, and as soon as they were finished it was again time for ten minutes of lovely Frei Beer. Now, I've never been good at keeping track of these things in my head, but I would definitely say that it lasted far more than ten minutes this time around.

Next band up was Gotthard, but we missed the start of it because we were waiting for some food to get ready. Since we had already missed some of it, we decided to hang back, and see the rest of the show sitting down in the grass.
Then it was time for what we had all been waiting for; the first of mighty Manowar's three hours a night show. What an experience!

Saturday:

We had planned to go down and see the winner of the Battle Of The Bands contest. Part of their prize was to play the first show of the day on the mainstage, but we sort of overslept that by a couple of hours...
When we finally got up, we decided to take it easy down in the camp site for a while. A neighbor with a big red truck was kind enough to play Manowar all the day, so the music wasn't lacking.
Also in the camp area, the villagers had a mobile supermarket parked, which had a wonderful selection of needful things.
Outside of this, as well as various other places, a new running order and information about what had happened was posted. Great news here was that it had been posted in both German AND English! This is something you seldom see at German festivals, and something we were very happy to see, since we've never gotten around to really learning their native language.

We didn't reach the festival area this day until it was time for Holyhell to take the stage. On our way there we got handed the brand new, not yet released Manowar single - Die With Honor. We also had to make a short stop at the American grill to try out their Dinosaur burger. It was ok tasty, but nowhere near the size you would have expected, so it didn't really quench our hunger. Lucky then that we had gotten a good breakfast from the supermarket truck.

After Holyhell had finished, it was time for one of the really big events of the festival; the announcement of the winners of Manowar's personal choppers. Sadly, we knew we didn't stand a chance, since the winners were picked by the ticket number, and as press people we didn't have a ticket. Yes, we were quite jealous.

When this was over it was time for Metal Force (former Majesty) to play a little for us, and then, once more: Manowar!
After yet another magnificent show, we wandered the festival area for a while, gladly thinking about all we had experienced in the last two weeks, and with a bit of remorse since it was now all over. We lingered for a bit, listening for a little while to Manowar songs being played over the car stereo of a Hummer with a custom Manowar paint job someone had parked near the central bar tent. A short time later one of the girls from the Manowar show came out and gave us a bonus fire show.
We also tried out the metal disco which was held in the Event Hall, before returning to our tent for a last night of sleep before driving the long way home the day after...

Now we are only looking forward to next year's edition of the Magic Circle Festival, which will be even bigger and wilder than this one. This was a promise from Joey, who also announced that Manowar will have their new album ready at this point, and that it will be accompanied by a book by a famous German fantasy author and also a computer game. This will be interesting to see.