This is Scuttlegoats attempt to summarise Wacken Open Air 2022 from his perspective. Being dehydrated, tired and incredibly forgetful, he decided against a chronological essay. Instead he chose the Jenny Nicholson way: An internet friendly list.
On the topic of Arrival
In an ideal world, the drive from where I am living to Wacken (or Gribbohm, depending where on the Campground you are) would only take about three and a half hours. Unfortunately, ideal this world is not. Hamburgs Elbtunnel is a common spot where the traffic chokes and this time was no exception. Between Hamburg and Bremen, we easily lost three hours to a traffic jam. It is of course possible to entertain yourself by screaming the festivals name at other cars and having conversations with them (at similar volumes).
The playlist I had carefully prepared with songs from bands the people in our car wanted to see ran for five and a half hours, a length that I had assumed was much longer than the drive would take. I used this opportunity to prepare a playlist for entering the campground filled with the trashiest pop music I could find. A mistake, likely - Markus Becker´s Bierkapitän has not left me till this day. We met up with friends and friends of friends (and their friends) on a nearby farm where we spent a couple minutes before forming a convoy. This way, we could form three interconnected camps that were able to share infrastructure in some way. This of course presented a challenge of coordinating the traffic up to the campground. To keep the cars together - 15 of them no less - multiple additional stops were required.
On the topic of the early Festival
To get a good spot, it is mandatory to arrive early. The campground technically opens at three pm on Monday, even though often they will open it even earlier if enough people have gathered. We ended up arriving at around six in the evening and with constructing the camp, including a pavilion and multiple tents, we were only able to get our festival wristbands at around eight pm. The line was pretty long, but a volleyball entertained the crowd that cheered and booed respectively when the ball was getting thrown or dropped. As we found out later, the wristband process had been elongated considerably as the wristbands now functioned for cashless payment. On later days, some people apparently had to wait for six hours until the organisers figured out a way to streamline it. There are no events on Monday at all, and even Tuesday and Wednesday are sparser.
We used the Tuesday for a meet-up at the pool. I declared myself pool king and wrestled for the title. I was defeated immediately. People also played with gigantic beach balls and formed a moshpit around the water fountain. Other than that, Mambo Kurt was the big attraction that day. A friend of ours had prepared Mambo Kurt bikini tops, that the women in our group were wearing. Seeing Mambo Kurt felt like a glorious return and seeing him perform his ironic act of performing rock and metal songs on an old electric organ frankly never gets old. The audience went more wild for him than I had seen ever before and after the gig, Kurt signed my partners bikini - apparently something he had never seen before. We concluded the day by drinking in a friends camp and eating cold, cold ravioli from the camp.
On the topic of the Festival Proper
For the sake of brevity, I am leaving out most gigs I only saw partially, listened to passively while eating or drinking or that I left because they were bad.
Wednesday was the first day that I would consider an official festival day. Wacken had made the decision to sell an extra ticket for the infield this year to see an additional six bands - a decision that I am both ideologically opposed to and also utterly disinterested in. After all, the bands that played the infield that day all worked in that metal genre that is the most vile and deplorable - Power Metal. You´d have to pay me to go see that. After an obligatory visit to the Wacken Firefighters that played their usual Mixture of ironic Schlager music (Rosamunde is an absolute banger), we killed some time by seeing Ingrimm who are not your grandmas medieval rock band as the blurb would tell you and likely the least bad of the bunch. The big concert that day was Loudness, who played a tight show and were visibly happy to be there. As many of these old fogeys, they gave few fucks and that’s what made it great.
Thursday was the big day. The day had, randomly, become trad metal heaven. After seeing Norther german dialect rock band Torfrock (or rather, three songs of theirs as the line to the infield had become too long), we were treated to Cirith Ungol, Grave Digger and Mercyful Fate basically right after each other - even if they were interrupted by Dirkschneider´s angry smurf performance and an especially lazy in person advertisement by Amon Amarth. Cirith Ungol were visibly happy and moved to be there and to be treated with such reference (they are an obscure act, after all). Grave Digger played their 40th anniversary show and were supported by pipes and drums. As someone from the ruhr area, I of course felt more than a little local pride in seeing that. And also nostalgia, as I had witnessed the 30th anniversary show 12 years prior. Mercyful Fate played an insanely good gig but the atmosphere of a headliner concert in the front row is just something I grew out of - all the crowdsurfers and an entitled teen that demanded to be let in front of us put a dent in my enjoyment. The day ended with GWAR decapitating celebrities as usual. Thursday was the day with the most important acts for us, but of course there were two more days to go.
On Friday, we finally saw Cattle Decapitation for the first time and I joked to my partner that I had needed the brutality - I had blastbeat withdrawal. As our feet were severely hurting we decided to skip At The Gates in favor of Blood Incantation, who played in the wasteland where we could sit. Satan played the Headbangers stage after and the singer made a conscious effort to talk less to not lose performance time - he failed, but a great gig nonetheless. We saw Slipknot sitting down, eating Pakistani food with a friend. I can´t say I am fond of them in the studio, but their show looked positively caustic. Mantar closed out the evening.
Saturday was the last day and, luckily for us, who were tired and had feet full of blisters, the emptiest. German carnival band Höhner played the medieval stage in the morning. A controversial choice, and I myself went mostly ironically. I ended up being taken by the atmosphere and the seriously good vibes they were bringing and, weirdly enough, ended up being one of my favorite concerts. We ended up not having to do anything for multiple hours and just chilled in the camp, even taking a nap in the tent - a festival in my thirties hits quite differently. The day ended up The Spirit (tight and intellectually engaging), Rectal Smegma (We slam danced sitting on a bench because the mood was just too great), Haggard (flawless execution despite technical issues and one of the best acts to wind down to) and, last but not least, Perturbator who had a great stage show and managed to keep us awake even though it was two AM at this point. I will say though, having more than five fakeout endings to a gig feels just a little cheap.
On The Topic Of Organisation
Many people had voiced many concerns about the festival beforehand. I will say that I perceived a lot of it as just being part of a culture of complaining, but some complaints were valid and had me worried beforehand. A particular worry of mine is that the rural spirit of the festival would be lost. In some ways, Wacken has made an effort to keep it. In others, I believe damage might have been done to it. On one hand, the Farmers Market, a replacement for the Kaufland store who dropped out, felt like a good way of dealing with it. Pooling lots of local businesses and startups onto a small market felt nice and is in line with the image of the fest - also the prices were among the best of the festival. On the other hand, I have heard from people in the village that die Ami Firma, referencing the new part owner of the festival, has forbidden the village to have stores or businesses open after 10 pm. Since this is a source of income for many people in the village, this could severely damage the relationship between the festival and the town - something I find very important and one of the things that makes Wacken special for me. Other issues existed on the festival itself. While the top up stations that people had complained about in advance ended up being fine - Yes, there are only 6 stations on the whole ground, but topping up money to your wristband is easy and they had many actual machines at the stations - it would have been nice if the process of activating the bands was a little more straightforward. For this, Wacken really needs to install more than just a single wristband exchange next year. Waiting for 6 hours in line while you can´t purchase anything on the grounds because you don´t have the wristband yet is inexcusable. Similarly, it would be nice if security personnel knew where things were. We were looking for the information booth and the Lost & Found at some point and no one could tell us where they were. Again, this just shouldn’t happen on a fest of this size.
On Music on the Campground
A fun phenomenon I wanted to talk about is the topic of Song Warfare on the campground. Not everyone arrives with a speaker system and most don´t have one strong enough to make people beyond their own camp hear it. Those who do, however, tend to not play heavy metal. Rather, they tend to play music which is either deliberately annoying, stupid, repetitive or all of the above and mostly just ironically enjoyable. Particularly we camped next to a camp who would play this for hours on end, often only playing the first minute before skipping back to the beginning. They would only rarely change it but when they did, it was most often something even more stupid (like this masterpiece of political satire that has not left me since). I respect the mindset - I am an irony bro at heart - but it also gets annoying after a while. It is like a family guy sketch that alternates between being funny and being annoying for its absurd amount of repetition. At the same time, I probably take ironic annoyance over the endless pirate and drinking songs from the camp next door. And to my campmate who insists on waking us each morning with this outdated power fantasy of a middle aged mom: there is a special place in hell for people like you.
On Leaving
Wacken is a big party, but one can only party for so long. After a full week of metal and nonsense, of alcohol and lots of walking, of alternating between ridiculously hot and dry during the day and cold and wet during the night, I was frankly happy to get home. Despite leaving relatively early, we couldn’t leave the ground for 4 hours, only to then get stuck in multiple hours of traffic jams. The road back was the worst I have ever been in and the whole trip ended up costing us 12 hours. I was exhausted in that special way that you can only really be in after an absurd car ride.
On Returning
Contrary to what I theorized on my pre-wacken essay, I do no longer believe Wacken is lost. Not yet, at least. There are both positive and negative developments within the festival and it will depend on the influence of the American investor, the village and the organisers and how they can cooperate in the future. What is clear to me is that the festival is changing. I know that I want to return in 2023. But I will likely have to reevaluate this yearly from now on. Lineup wise, I can go somewhere else. But if it is about the atmosphere and the feeling, I cannot. As of now, the feeling isn´t lost. Fingers crossed it will survive under the imminent threat of even more commercialisation.