Wacken Open Air nostalgia

I attended the Wacken festival over five years from 2004-2008, spanning my late teens to early 20s. I've recently been getting very nostalgic about my trips there- they represent a period of youthful freedom that I'll likely never experience again. I made some friends for life there, and have literally hundreds of funny little memories from that village in North Germany.

My first visit aged 18 in 2004 in particular blew my mind (although, to paraphrase the great Lemmy, a day at the beach will blow your mind at that age :lol:). Metal music had largely been a fairly solitary interest for me up until that point, so standing in a field in the baking heat amongst 40,000 of 'my people' for the first time was quite an experience. There was also a huge sense of the exotic, with a German festival feeling quite different from anything we'd get in the UK (particularly in the years before Bloodstock et al).

Of course, as with everything in life, future trips met with the law of diminishing returns, and I spent a lot of time and money at similar European festival around the same time too. I decided that watching Maiden there in 2008 was about as good as it would ever get, and that year would prove to be my last.

I noticed quite a few changes in the years that I attended the festival, and feel that there were two landmark moments that changed the tone and feel of the event. Firstly, booking Machine Head in 2005 seemed to bring a very different audience (no offence to fans of that band, but it seems like a lot of the more 'unique' European bands started to fall off the bill in favour of more mainstream acts from that year on). Secondly, I found that doubling the audience capacity in 2007 made the festival grounds almost impossible to navigate.

It seems that these days, you need to organise your ticket purchase about 18 months in advance- again, this was not a consideration when I was going, and I even remember a friend buying a ticket on the day after losing his on the way there! I also feel that the audience energy seems far lower on any live streams I've watched over the past decade.

Anyway, this is a bit of a ramble, but I'm interested in hearing thoughts from those who have been long term attendees of Wacken. Have you noticed big changes since the early 2000s?
 
I've been to Wacken three times, 2008, 2009 and 2010. The former two are among my most cherished memories for many reasons, and 2010 was meant to be the one to top it all but it kinda became... meh. That's not just because of the festival itself, but also because I had been to Sonisphere the weekend before and was starting to get ever so slightly too old for two festivals in a row, and mostly it was because I had overstretched my financial resources and that threw me into a major crisis which essentially made me back away from festivals and recall that time with mixed feelings.
But there was also the thing that Wacken had gotten quite a bit of media attention in Germany at that time and it became a bit of a fad to go there for non-metalheads, and the result was that the whole thing was full of people in bunny costumes and idiots who threw up in other people's tents (not mine, thankfully). There was a lot less metal and a lot more Schlager to be heard that year and I bloody hated it. In the aftermath I had conversations with some of those tourist types and they typically told me off for going there because of the music and slagging me for being such an elitist. When I really am not, I'm just thinking if something is advertised as a metal festival, I want to get that if I pay for it. And my hometown (Berlin) was really full of party tourists already.
If we will ever return to festival cycles I'd probably go for smaller ones like Brutal Assault, where I was in 2015. That was all metal and no bunny costume.
 
I'd noticed the slow tendency towards 'tourist' fans in 2008, and can imagine that things have gotten worse since then. Although it's a good documentary, the lengthy feature on Wacken in 'Metal- A Headbanger's Journey' seems to have quickly added to its fame.

Although I first went in 2004, I had been reading about the festival for years in metal magazines, and could not conceive of a place where a band like, say, Immortal, could play in front of tens of thousands of people. As I say, this was in the very non-metal UK in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Wacken seemed like an almost mythical place for fans of true metal.

I'm sure it's still a blast, and I would love to attend again one day, even for the sake of wandering around the campsite like a ghost haunting the landscapes of my youth.
 
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