Wacken Open Air may have (only) been on its 24th year, but we still had an anniversary to celebrate – Lunah Lauridsen was on her 15th consecutive year visiting!
In a great camp dubbed Club Laško, together with friends and colleagues from Austria, Italy and Sweden, we were ready to make the most out of yet another year at this large, very international German festival...

Wacken had been sold out for a very long time, 8 years running, which serves as a testimony to the importance and popularity of this place. A lot of water, more or less polluted by beer of course, has run under the bridge since this started out as a small thing on a cows pasture.
Now they were pulling in top-class acts like Rammstein, Doro and Alice Cooper to headline the place, Doro even serving up something very special as she was celebrating her own anniversary with 30 years in rock! You can imagine the excitement that filled the place!
But let’s take it from the beginning, shall we?

Wacken is still, in a way, considered a three-day festival going from Thursday to Saturday, although it has been long known that the festivities start out already on the Wednesday. The main festival area might not be open at that time, but the Wackinger Village and the Bullhead City Circus (that’s the tent if you were wondering) certainly are, and in the latter many of the international metal battle bands were already warming up the crowd. We have had a plan about reviewing at least one of these bands each year, though sadly this year it could not be done (although, we did acquire a CD from the Japanese group Mysterious Priestess which they were kindly handing out to anyone who passed by, and it has some pretty cool ideas (together with a not so cool production)). Instead, we got out first kicks off together with Henry Rollins and his incredible spoken words show, something we had been introduced to last year and had been hungry for more ever since!
We also had a plan about enjoying Coppelius as this band had also taken us with storm the last (and first) time we saw them, but someone had made the mistake (surely it can be nothing else?) of putting them on the Wackinger Stage, so not only did the large orchestra not have enough space to completely fold out (they did their best though), but it was also nearly impossible to get a good position to see and hear them. This was also to be our last show of the year at the Wackinger Stage, a place good enough for the minimalistic middle-ages troupes but not nearly befitting any type of band with some kind of following!
Anyway, enough ranting about that, the Wackinger Village also has some good things to offer, for example the meat-onna-stick meal and mead. I really enjoyed the mead, and the show the bartenders were putting serving it – basically, it was a very chaotic water-fight going on in there, surely delaying orders but keeping people entertained at the same time.

Delays were otherwise not such a problem at Wacken anno 2013, and neither was entertainment.
While some may have felt that more serious and large names would have helped the billing, I found the line-up to have a quite a few interesting inclusions, even if they weren’t the biggest bands in the world.
Skyline was of course a must-see, the band that opens up the main stage every year had yet to disappoint us. Bands like Deep Purple and Ugly Kid Joe represented music I have long listened to but never seen live before, and in the revisiting section I was fondly looking forward to Danzig with Doyle after the masterful show played at Copenhell earlier in the summer. This wasn’t the only act though, I was also really looking forward to re-visiting the bleak and futuristic visions of Fear Factory, having a party with the sacrilegious lycanthropes of Powerwolf and going to war with the metal battalion of Sabaton. In stark contrast to these, the promised acoustic concert from Amorphis also shone through as another Wacken speciality that needed a try, and Anthrax would surely deliver a thrash fest worthy of the original glory days of the genre.
With so much to look forward to, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, not much actually!
Sure, Fear Factory, whilst delivering an interesting and surprising setlist, disappointed badly with the laziest performance I have ever seen them put on, and Amorphis’ styling (while only being acoustic for a few songs in the beginning) took some getting used to, but overall I am very happy with the concerts at Wacken this year. Most bands delivered well above average shows, and while being in tough competition with Rammstein, for me it was the Metal Queen, Doro, who took the price of best in show this year – sure, there were a lot of making fun of the extreme amount of thank you’s and I love you’s she delivered between songs, but they were heartfelt and sincere and because of that it still worked for me.
As always with Wacken, things are missed out on as well, mostly because of artists performing more or less on the same time, but also sometimes simply because of the logistical problem of going from one stage to another through the massive horde of people visiting the festival. Because of this we sadly had to give up on Scott Ian’s spoken words show, which we were later told had been quite interesting and well delivered, and for very different reasons we missed out on Agnostic Front’s show at the Black Stage. This was out of pure survival instincts though – this year’s Wacken turned out to be one hot affair, and since the only water to be found at the festival area was sold in the one-litre glasses and cost 10€ (what the hell is up with that Wacken? With the weather being like this, water should be handed out for free!) we instead opted for a stroll out to the camping area where we bought ourselves silly in water bottles from one of the one-site supermarkets.

Even though this Wacken offered mostly shine (thank heavens! And damn you all who complained about the heat!), it wouldn’t be a true Wacken experience without a bit of rain as well, and thus we saw a short but hard shower during Lamb Of God’s show. Whilst killing our interest in them, there were still many, many fans which stuck around and played in the mud.
With the sun back out shortly after, things dried up nicely though, and the only evidence of the shower remaining were a very few, very small and very well visited puddles of mud, and an overall softness of the nowadays stabilised ground.

Rain was sadly not the only thing short-lived experience at Wacken this year.
If there is one thing, or I should say one artist, everyone but us seems to look forward to with extreme delight each and every time his band and he visits the festival, it is ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister.
Recently out of hospital, the recovering 67 year old frontman had agreed to still play Wacken even though his health had forced the band to cancel the entire tour that had been planned – thus is the attraction and the dedication that comes only with the Wacken festival and fans! Still, in the end even the support of some 75000 metal fans could not keep the big man going, and after only a few songs Motörhead were forced to call it quits for this time and leave the stage. If this is not a sign of the end being nigh, I don’t know what is? Does not the Book of Revelation state; ”And lo and behold, that they should see Lemmy leave Wacken before finishing his set”? No? Well, it should have, that’s how serious this is!
Apart from this, Wacken was hardly hit at all by cancellations, the only major thing I heard about was Crematory who had to cancel at the last minute because of a death in the family. Upon downloading the Wacken smart-phone app at the festival I was extremely delighted to see that Suidakra had jumped in to fill the spot, and they were now the band closing the festival down from the W.E.T. Stage, a job they handled with unexpected excellence!
Apart from them, only Haggard had been seen play the tent stages (by us that is), but due to a photograph ban at the time (which had nothing to do with the band) we were unable to get an individual review for them. I will however tell you that the band performed as best they could, but the many people were rather cramped on the small stage and the heat of the tent at the time made it almost unbearable. Great effort by the band though, they were the only thing keeping us from running out of there screaming for fluids! In fact, this was where I figured out the trick to balance an ice-cube on the top of my head. In the heat, it didn’t take many songs for the cube to melt away, but even as the melted water ran down my face and neck, it still held just the slightest bit of coldness in it to be refreshing!

The ice-cube trick was one I would use again later on, mostly down at the camp.
Here beer was of course flowing more freely as well even without the aid of the beer back-packing vendors of the festival area (life-savers, those guys!), but as our car had turned into a furnace since we didn’t have the good sense to get some form of shade for it, it wasn’t much help in cooling down. Luckily, our Austrian camp mates (who had arrived in a much larger vehicle) had brought along a refrigerator box, and with the help of this, and our own beer supply containing among others the lovely Laško beer, many a suffering throat was saved for future festival endeavours.
This was also one of the few times we have tried the camp experience, as opposed to just camping out by ourselves, and judging from both good and bad experiences in the past with this sort of thing, I can without doubt say that Club Laško rates among the highest of my camp stays. To slightly rip of the statement on the crew-shirt’s of the Wacken personnel – The festival was good, but the camp was brilliant!

In conclusion, was Wacken 2013 hit or shit?
I’d have to say that on all accounts, I’m seriously leaning towards hit. Lunah’s anniversary was duly celebrated, and other than that there wasn’t much changed in the everyday life compared to recent years, everything seemed to run smoothly. The same old likes and complaints remain (too many people on too little space being the main thing, and too large bands on too small stages following shortly after), but these are things you expect and accept when going to Wacken. That’s just part of the package, as is the fact that this is most likely the largest and most international metal gathering on the face of the Earth, and everywhere you turn, there is some friendly stranger there to greet you with a hearty hail and cheers with the beer! How can you go wrong with that?