While many were happy to hang around the main stage and listen to Accept, we decided to take a route less travelled, thus heading over to the second stage to watch the German black/pagan metal band Varg from Cobourg, Bavaria.

”Are you ready to destroy everything?!”
- Phillip ”Freki” Seiler (vocals)

Despite this and other hard comments from the vocalist, he (and the rest of the band I’m sure) quickly showed that he had a sense of humour as well and that this was not to be taken overly serious. And how could we when he began by saying ”thank you and goodnight!” after the sound-test was done?
Yep, these blood and black painted large men clad in leather armour actually turned out not to be as frightening as their image would have them appear, and that was at least for me a good thing – it can be hard to take a band seriously if they take themselves all too seriously, but when the band is open and shows that they can as easily have a laugh as they can growl about death and destruction, then the appeal to me is turned considerably up.
Freki was also kind enough to recognize the fact that not all here understood the German language of which he tried to use in the beginning, so he promised to try and speak both English and German for a broader appeal to the crowd, but apologized up front about maybe forgetting it in a place or two as he was pretty drunk by now.

Aside from the aforementioned humour, the band-members also clearly knew how to push the right buttons on stage; their performance was as lively during the songs as it was funny between them, and they showed that they had some real primal power that they were planning to dish out over the gathered people.
This mostly came out by a furious and yet synchronized on and off stage headbanging, but our throats were also pushed to the limit to see if they had been able to cope with the long festival as Freki more than once led us into loud shout-along chants, when the music allowed it that is. When it didn’t he was satisfied just seeing all of our devil-horns raised in the air, and the impressively large crowd (considering the timing) was more than willing to follow his command.

I admit that the music as such wasn’t really my cup of tea, and besides that the show could have gained tremendously from a better job at the mixing table, but all in all I was very positively surprised by my first meeting with Varg. They came off as a bunch of guys who truly just wanted to do their thing and have a good time with that, and what more than that is needed really?