WACKEN SURVIVORS 2012!!

Yes, this year the metal gods were truly pushing the limits of the ”Rain or Shine” motto of the German festival, and we were on spot, in the mud, to see just how far it would go.

After having a heavy downpour for several days in the area prior to the festival, the Wacken crew had been left with no choice but to ask visitors to delay their arrival at the festival for as long as possible, as they wanted as little stress to the wet ground as possible.
A wise decision, based on prior experiences of the festival in combination with too much water, and thus we made our arrival at the largest metal festival the world has seen (to my knowledge at least) in the early afternoon on the Wednesday. The reason for arriving at this point, and not later on in the day, was that we were determined to go and check out the Danish contribution to the Wacken Metal Battle competition, Electric Hellride.
You see, for once we here at Metalmoments felt that our homeland had a band with a decent shot at winning representing us in the competition, and to put it short, Electric Hellride kicked ass in the inferno-hot tent which held the Headbangers Stage and the W.E.T. Stage. In the end, the win would go to another Danish band however, the Faroese contestant (I’m not sure why they sported their own competition, but they did) Hamferð which play quality death/doom, but at the time, the Hellride were giving a large Wacken audience one hell of a ride!

So far I’ve been writing about a really wet weather, and then mentioned a hotter than hell tent, and if you’re wondering how this all sticks together the answer is simple – the Wednesday of Wacken was hot and sunny, beyond all expectations even! Sure, the ground was a bit soft from the earlier rains, but that only made the tent-pins go in all the easier, and the way things looked at this point, we were heading for a great festival!
It was not to last though, as we would find out all too soon…
It had been raining during the night, but when I got out of the tent the sun was out again. Skyline was the first band of the day, as tradition has it, and for their show a small shower visited the Holy Wacken Land, after which our Brazilian friends in Sepultura brought a warming sun with them. U.D.O. was up next, and here the clouds really let us have it again, so much in fact that we felt forced to seek shelter. Not to bore you with too many details, I’ll stick to explaining that this was the way things went throughout the weekend – a schizophrenic weather which would punish us with heavy rains, only to turn into burning sunshine a second later, and then of course back again.
This, in combination with the vast amount of feet that made up the Wacken visitors on the all too small space that makes up the festival area along with the adjacent Wackinger Village and the Bullhead City Stage tent, made for one icky, sticky gruel of German mud.
For some, this is of course bliss, and on our way from stage to stage we did see a few people wrestling it out in the puddles of water and earth, looking like they had the time of their life, but for those of us intent on watching shows on all of the stages, the glue-like ground made life increasingly difficult as more and more soil was spoiled by trampling.
Now, in all fairness, I must point out that the Wacken crew has done an incredible job preparing the festival for events like these, stabilizing the ground and whatnot. Even with the way things were, I never entered a spot which was more than ankle deep, where I have tried at earlier editions of the festival with similar weather conditions, that there were places close to knee-deep. This was certainly an unbelievable improvement, and of course you can’t blame the festival for the weather, but only thank them for containing the damage as best they could.

Enough about that though, let’s move on to the music, shall we?
Wacken is always a festival packed with good bands, large and small, but this year they had an especially promising program for us – we had Scorpions delivering their farewell for good show (we’ll see about that), we had both Dimmu Borgir and Moonspell delivering special, symphonic shows, Volbeat delivering their only open air show for this year, plus the more regular shows from Gamma Ray, Paradise Lost, D-A-D and I could go on! I admit to being a bit saddened by the news that U.S. thrashers Forbidden had cancelled, but when Wacken called in the crazy-ass Swedes of Diablo Swing Orchestra as a replacement, I could not be more thrilled, as this is certainly not a band which gets out and about much around these parts today.
There is one slight problem though; unlike most of the other festivals we visit, which normally have two stages, Wacken is a giant among festivals, sporting no less than seven music stages, as well as a couple of smaller event stages, and you know what that means don’t you?
Yup, as sure as the bread always lands with the buttered side down, you can be sure that several of the bands you want to see will either be playing at the same time, overlap each other in part, or simply play so far away from each other that it is impossible to reach from one to the other in time…
Also, having 75000 people standing in front of you for the main acts doesn’t exactly put you in a good position to enjoy the show. But these are the conditions you enter into when visiting a festival of Wacken’s size, there are no two ways about it.
Still, it didn’t exactly sit well with us that we had to give up a lot of shows we had been looking forward to from home just because of logistical issues; in this manner acts as Machine Head, Scorpions, Volbeat and Leave’s Eyes (which was guest fronted by Heri Joensen of Týr and Heljareyga) had to go, and Amon Amarth, which anyone visiting this site should know by now are amongst the house favourites here, had to be seen from outside the main gates of the festival area.
A lot of good shows were seen though, so it wasn’t all bad. As the first I’d like to point out Gamma Ray’s sunny, warm and well-performed show on an early Saturday afternoon, mostly because we, due to photo-restrictions from the festival, were unable to cover this show in an individual review.
There were more though, Moonspell and Diablo Swing Orchestra ranked among the true highlights, Warrior Soul was possibly what took me the most by surprise (in a positive manner), Henry Rollins spoken words show blew my mind, and yes, I could go on with this list as well. As I mentioned above, Wacken collects a good and varied set of acts, and 2012 in particular held some rare stuff that we really wanted to take part in.

Given the massive size of the festival, Wacken also gives its visitors the opportunity to watch and listen to other types of entertainment than music, even though the music is the primus motor and hopefully always will be.
Just above I mentioned an astounding spoken words show by Henry Rollins (and here I’d like to take the time to thank a colleague of mine for opening my eyes to this type of entertainment from the big man), but there was more, much more.
We saw iron-clad men fight it out in live knight duels, Braveheart wannabe’s compete in highland games and regular visitors compete against each other in a pole-sitting competition (yes, they actually sat on large poles for extended amounts of time, simple as that), but more importantly than that, we saw Mambo Kurt!
Yes, I admit that technically he is some sort of musical act, but he is at the same time a sort of comedic side-show which has been a household name at Wacken for several years now, and a must-see for any true Wacken goer.
For the first year we also saw some of the wrestling which took part in the Bullhead City stage, and here we are definitely NOT talking about the Olympic version of the sport. Overpumped men with lousy acting skills pretended to beat each other up with either unbelievable fighting techniques or just simple props – either way they chose to do it looked just as fake as the other, and all I could think about was how embarrassingly bad this sort of thing looked up close (we were waiting for a concert only a few metres from the ring (which is a silly name for a place that is painstakingly square)).
The Bullhead City tent did offer other, equally silly but far more amusing, ways of entertainment though; among them was the Air Guitar contest, which was just what it sounds like – some people from the crowd were invited up on the stage to compete in doing the most outstanding air guitar work the world has ever seen. They were a mixed bunch to say the least, both in their choice of songs and in their performance quality, but I remember it being a guy in a white shirt, the last one to compete, who ran off with the winning glory. After this, the jury of the competition, a ragtag team of oddballs, got together to show us what a real air guitar performance should look like, and performed a highly entertaining and well planned and put together air guitar opera of sorts, with loads of famous songs mixed together. That was actually very cool, and if you get the chance at a later festival, you should try and check it out as well!

But what are all these forms of entertainment good for, if there are no people to be entertained by them? Naught I say!
And that brings us to what Wacken is about more than anything else - the people and the community they make up.
Some friends were missing this year, which of course was sad, but others were there and kept the party rolling. This was bad in the way that some memories ended up a bit fuzzier than intended, but these things happen as anyone should know.
New friends were also made, simply by greeting our German neighbour we ended up spending a long Wednesday evening just chilling in the camp, talking and throwing back a few beers. Even though schedules prevented us from spending too much time together for the rest of the festival, we still greeted each other with a hearty “Skål” when our paths crossed throughout the weekend.
I am sad to report that we also got to experience the ugly underbelly of beer-drinking as well, as another German man got overly upset about a spilt beer and decided to act out in a very aggressive and threatening demeanour. In the end it was only a minor thing, as one of his friends intervened and took care of him, but I was still surprised as I have, to my memory, not witnessed anything like this before in my many years of visiting Wacken, or any metal festival for that sake. Usually, metalheads are the best behaved people one can hang around at larger events, but I guess there are always a few rotten eggs in every barrel.
The episode was soon put behind us though, and the festival moved ever forward.

I must admit, that when Wacken came to an end with the promoters’ farewell, the surprise Edguy show and the rolling credits at the end I felt dead tired. Three days of stumbling from one stage to the other in mud and rain, through all the bottleneck gates and the many, many visitors had simply taken its toll, and even though we decided it would be wiser to leave at night so as not to get the car stuck in too much mud (15 tractors had been drafted to sort everyone out, 15 tractors for 75000 people), we still didn’t reach very far before exhaustion forced us to sleep.
Again, I must stress that the Wacken crew had done an incredible job to keep the ground as good as possible, but even they were up against an unrelenting and unbeatable adversary this year.
Was it all worth it?
Well, yes, it always is, this is after all the largest metal bash there is, but 2012 will still be remembered as the year Wacken really made me feel old...

As a final remark, it amused me to open the battle bag and see a commercial for a Wacken shuttle bus service going back and forth between the festival and the towns’ outdoor swimming-pool. I speculate on how much activity this saw...