Inside the tent on the W.E.T. Stage, at exactly 10pm, Warrior Soul entered the stage in front of the smallest audience I had seen at Wacken so far. Maybe not so surprisingly considering Scorpions were playing their large farewell show on the main stage at the same time, but we opted for these guys instead, and we weren’t completely alone.

“I like rock ‘n’ roll, do you like Warrior Soul?!”
- Kory Clarke (vocals)

Warrior Soul may have entered to the smallest audience, but the cool thing was that they still acted as if they were the ones on the main stage with 75000 fans screaming for them, and that was something that worked well in their favour! The band also managed to get a larger audience throughout the gig (without it ever becoming very large though), and it was obvious that the fans who had shown up were really into the whole thing!
Even though they were playing on one of the smallest stages of the festival, the members of Warrior Soul still delivered one heck of a lively performance as they danced and rock out as much as was humanly possible for them, and Clarke was constantly knocking over and then picking up the stand for his microphone – he was actually going at it so hard that the cord for the microphone was pulled out at one point, but that didn’t stop the band from their set course to rock. It was just a quick pick up and we’re good to go again.

In line with the title of the then soon to be released album Stiff Middle Finger, Clarke was also a heavy user of the ‘fuck you’ hand sign and after a while he got the crowd to join in on the critique of society and everything else that is wrong with the world.
In fact, this rock show had the audience shouting loudly and at least the front was headbanging fervently when the songs invited to such behaviour (which they were a lot of the time).
I don’t know Warrior Soul well enough personally to give a detailed tour of the setlist or exactly what happened during which song, I sadly can’t even tell you the name of the AC/DC cover they played (except it was something about ‘Fuck you’ (do we see a pattern here?)), but I am experienced enough in rock and metal concerts to tell you that Warrior Soul was pulling of a great one.
I had liked the acoustic show they played at Sweden Rock Festival two years earlier, but this was a completely different beast altogether, and the band far exceeded my expectations. This was highly entertaining and deserving of a larger following if you ask me. Maybe next time they come around you will join in as well?

Setlist (incomplete):

Love Destruction
Blown
Shine Like It
Downtown
Fuck The Pigs