Erika's Metalblog: Welcome to the festival

Anoter week in the heat has passed. Before me and Peter went to Bang Your Head Festival in Balingen I got to pick up the keyes to the new flat. I also got the chance to do a better blueprint of it all. The first try I did had a big hole in the middle, couldn't really get the propotions right after the first quick look at it. The place still looked as nice as I remembered it and it acutally looked bigger now when it was complately empty. Won't last for long... I've packed another 5 boxes of CD's now and I'm still not done.

The first bedroom will be the musicroom, with the guitars, amps and a computer for recording. The CD's should fit in there as well I hope. There might be a Wall Of Fame in the hall, well see...

Homemade blueprint of the flat

The vinyl goes to the livingroom to start with! All of them should fit in there. Also Peter' collection of fancy books need to get a place and all my collectors edition music boxes, the Helloween Hat, Maiden chest, Slayer Apocalypse and so on... When I start thinking about it, these 85 sq meters start to sound small!

Then I went to Uffes for a BBQ, he was on vacation and in a really good mood. We ate and had a few beers. Watched some TV which was only crap. Uffe said he was going to watch all his Deep Purple DVD's (about 20) and drink beer all night. Luckily he decided to chose the Björler DVD disco instead which was only the At The Gates documentary and The Haunted - Rodmovie! really cool movies both of them. I really need to watch more music DVD's!
I fell asleep on his couch around 2am when he changed to regular films instead. The thing is, my taxi was booked for 04:30am to go to the airport and fly to BYH. Need I say I wasn't the most cheerful person in the world when the alarm sounded in the morning!

But the flights went really smooth. I met up with Peter in Copenhagen, from there we had the same flight. The trainride went equally smooth, just picked up the tickets, printed the itinerary. we even had time to pick up some brunch at Burger King before the train left. And about 2 hours later we arrived in Balingen. This was the first thing we saw getting of the train and I at least got supercharged for the pre-party.

A really nice pre-party I think

We checked in to the nice Hotel Hamann and decided to rest a little. Good idea since neither Peter nor me had gotten much sleep the night before. Then out for a Pizza dinner and a warm up beer and we both were fit for fight.

Beer-art?

The Pre-party and the Festival was great as usual. But more about the band will show up on Metal Temple later. The dangerous thing is that the beer they have slips down really easy and when it's hot, crowded and as amazing music as it was it tend to be a bit much of the good stuff. No real danger but it would have been great to sleep another hour or two the next morning.

First day of the Festival was AMAZING, what a line-up. Grand Magus, Forbidden, Loudness, Anvil, Jon Oliva's Pain, Doro, Krokus... A littl too much to be able to fit everything in. All gigs I saw were really good but no other band really stood chance towards Jon Oliva's Pain this night. Festival is the absolute best album this far this year! And that they played "Death Rides A Black Horse" was super, love that one. Anvil & Forbidden wasn't far behind though!

We got invited to hang out a little with Anvil also since Peter is a good friend of the band. Cool guys I have to say.

Anvil & Peter

And since Jon Oliva's Pain had the dressing room right next to Anvil I got a chance to say hello to those guys. I have to dig up the pics of the Backdrop on my wall again to show them what it looked like. It won't be the same in the new place though.

Jon & Me

I didn't force myself into their dressing room if that's what you think. Jon gave me an invite and something "you're everhwhere"... Could be worse!

We took the opportunity we had to sit in the shade and rest for a while in the real backstage area. Steve Smyth was hanging out there too! I got a little giggly for a while so Peter threatened he would go and talk to him for me and say I didn't dare to talk to him.

Me & Steve

I couldn't have that. It went fine, Steve thought I looked familiar and I said I've seen him tons of times with all his bands. I got to hear a little about his new BC Rich guitars before we headed back out for the rest of the bands.

The next day served and equally stron lineup with Fates Warning, Nevermore, Sacred Steel, Queensryche, The Haunted and Twisted Sister. Some rain also unfortunately so it was a very wet Fates Warning concert.

There's always a lot of people you see year after year at these events, Anita is an old friend of Peter's and last year was the first time I met them. Always happy, always having fun! Perhaps we'll meet up with them in Italy later this year for Play It Loud!

Peter with Anita and her sister Irene

The thing though, people don't seem to care. There's never mud at BYH, sure the beer gets little lighter but half the people drinks the horrible Radlers anyway an then it can't matter so much. The funniest thing happened when we gave up and headed back o the hotel. The average age is quite high at BYH so Twister Sister works extremely well there. The crowd was sining like crazy all the time. And yes, Twisted Sister were good as hell but... Back to the story, there were a bunch of dudes behid us, somewhere between 40 and 50 I guess and they sang "we're not gonna take it" LOUD! But then, for the next line in the lyrics.... "HELLO, we ain't gonna take it"! Hilaroius I must say!

And then, as they asked at the Hotel, will you be back next year! HELL YEAH!