One Noisy day in Winter... the Winternoise review
Yes, it's that time again: time for a gargantuan review packed full to bursting with my own brand of wizardous wordsmithery. With a bit of luck, some of you will consider reading it.
Crossposted everywhere, which in this day and age only means metal_community and heathenforay.
WINTERNOISE
CLUB N8, OSNABRÜCK, GERMANY
SATURDAY 24 JANUARY 2009
Guilty parties: Shorthair Ben and Gabby, who were instrumental in half the story...
Gemma and four others came from Cambridge, rather later than us.
No grovelling apologies if half the links are in German - these are German hostelries we are dealing with here!
Click the pictures to enlarge them. They're all 1024 × 768 pixels; that should be big enough for anyone.
22/23.01.2009: SET SAIL TO PLUNDER
A while back, Ben was quite annoyed that I wanted to confirm that he was as dedicated to the trip as I was, getting incredibly defensive when I asked if he'd bought a ticket as opposed to just talking about it. 10 pm on Thursday, 22nd January showed him exactly why I'd been so forceful in my inquisitions. The turnout was poor. For a trip that was supposed to be seven of us, at least, in two cars, three people in one car was the final result, which further justifies my long-held belief that people talking about going to an event, whether it be on this side of the Channel or not, translates to a rather lower number who will actually go. Actually, it's a wonder that any of us made it at all; I'd had to order two tickets, as the first one, ordered at the end of November, never arrived - and we all know which side of the Channel had managed to lose it; it turned out Ben and Gabby had had equal problems getting hold of their tickets well.
Three of us in one car meant a rather easier job in organising transport and accommodation, though. We'd booked less than a week in advance, so £42 for the ferry was a great deal - even if it meant leaving Dover at four in the morning. Accommodation was rather trickier; Gemma's party were booked into Hotel Sieme, which had run out of places, and the hostels in and around Osnabrück appeared to be on the tricky side of impossible to book. So, after some discussion, we settled on the impressive-looking but only two-star Hotel Busch-Atter... which we further discovered, shortly after booking, wasn't actually in Osnabrück, but about five miles away in Atter, an almost-separate village. A railway station called "Oslo Sud-Asker" had caused similar confusion almost three years ago on the Norway trip, giving no obvious impression how far away Asker was from the centre of Oslo...
But 10 pm arrived, Gabby parked her car on my drive to give any of the local chavs the idea that there really was someone at home, and part two of the "Someone Doesn't Want Us To Get To Winternoise" saga kicked off, with the drive down to Dover plagued by a constant deluge of rain. Despite setting off well before 11, and needing to check in at three, we only made it with half an hour to spare... which was rather less than I'd been banking on. Sleeping on the boat was as impossible as ever, necessitating an hour-long stop somewhere in Belgium which meant I'd be able to complete the trip, and Ben and Gabby could share a baguette (with obvious outcome) and annoy the locals with the incessant pinging of Sonic the Hedgehog picking up rings on Gabby's Nintendo DS (and who'd have seen that coming a few years ago?) The other two, of course, had picked up every opportunity for a nap in the back of the car, despite the constant blare of Windir, Suidakra and Clutch, and the constant battering of the rain. Most of the time when they were both awake, it seems I'd look in my rear view mirror to see the two lovebirds clamped all over each others' faces. Cheers for those timely reminders, eh? Anyway. It seems I'd have been better off timewise taking a break a bit further up the road, outside Antwerp, where the ring road in the direction we wanted to take was blocked solid. Sitting in a queue for half an hour wasn't much fun, and eventually I decided to take the other direction, which would involve a toll bridge... that the Belgian authorities had decided to let us all through for free, and that's not something that would ever been seen on a certain construction just outside Dartford. Despite this generous gesture, that didn't stop us from being further slowed down by an unexpected diversion towards Rotterdam, where we crossed an inland piece of sea which made it quite obvious how much trouble Holland will be in if the global warmingists turn out to be right all along and sea levels rise by seven metres.
So, detours and breaks taken care of, it was getting on for five by the time we crossed the German border, and almost six when we arrived (with very few navigational problems) at the hotel, which appeared both inside and out to be even more impressive than the pictures and deserving of far more than its meagre two stars - as you can all no doubt see above. I checked out the bus situation while Ben and Gabby adorned their room with more blankets than was necessary, and armed with CAMRA's Good Beer Guide for Germany, we had out first beer of the trip - in my case, the marvellously dark Köstritzer Schwarzbier, from a Thüringen brewery that spent 45 years shut away in East Germany, which was a fine start, though given the brewery's size, I wonder if it was directed towards quantity over quality during the communist period. One down and plenty to go, we boarded the last bus for two hours to take us to the Neumarkt in central Osnabrück, and onto a random walk through the city centre, which we figured would take us to a pub sooner rather than later - in sharp contrast to the previous miserable findings in Oberhausen. And there we were thinking that with Osnabrück being a university city, as had been repeatedly hammered into me at GCSE age by my bright yellow Zickzack textbook, pubs would be easy to find. There weren't as many as I'd expected, though, and the first pub we decided to venture into may well have been the roughest in the whole of Osnabrück, if the punters at the bar were anything to go by. The woman at the bar was pleasant enough, though, even if she did describe Ben and Gabby as "kindergarten" - yes, I heard that, never mind that everyone else in the pub was 40-plus. The weißbier was merely Paulaner; I had a chance to sample Frankenheim Altbier as well, given that Gabby drank so incredibly slowly. We soon made our escape; further bars, less worth mentioning, were almost as hard to find as in Oberhausen, and when we found one that looked promising but served only the likes of Stella and Carlsberg, we retreated briefly to Ali Baba's kebab shop for The Greatest Kebab Ever™ - a chicken döner with cheese sauce, similar to what might once have been seen on Drop The Dead Donkey. Not that Ben would have known, due to his preference for being Puritan Vegetable Folk. While in Ali Baba's we decided to find the one bar that I'd been recommended to visit while at the Derby Winter Beer Festival, and also by the Good Beer Guide - Osnabrück's own brewpub, the Rampendahl. Ben regaled me with tales of how he'd imagined a German Bierkeller to be, and so far, none of the pubs had lived up to his imagination. The Rampendahl was closest, it being decorated in green-painted steel, with a bar area and upstairs balcony being made entirely of wood. I suspect that what he'd had in mind was more of a Bavarian scene, something like Bamberg's famous Schlenkerla, home of wonderful Rauchbier and a place which I really must visit someday. The brewing area was fully integrated into the pub, and as luck would have it, the only available seating was right by the brewing kit - where a tour was being conducted for some interested members of the German equivalent of CAMRA.
It was worth the effort finding it, as much Spezial (the dark one) and Hell (the pilsener) was drunk, with a free helping of bread rolls and a sausage-shaped blob of... something to spread on it which appeared to be made almost entirely of lard. I would have stayed for a weißbier as well, but my stomach was starting to protest, and Gabby's assertion that she was too tired to continue to function indicated that it was time to knock off. How she'd have fared if she'd had to drive as well is beyond me. The two of them decided to grab a couple of "souvenirs" while nobody was looking... and were good enough to pick me up one as well. I say "good", although there's a fair few people on the moral crusaders' side who might not agree. Still, infractions unnoticed by the bar staff, we piled into a taxi that took us back to way out in the sticks for a fiver each, and prepared for an early morning in which we would explore Osnabrück before the main event...
24.01.2009: WINTERNOISE
...only things didn't work out quite as planned. I'd not set my phone to German time, not realising that I'd be using it as an alarm clock for the morning, so when I finally woke up and thought that it was a bit light for 7:30 in the morning, it's because it was actually 8:30. Cue a very hasty shower and a charge downstairs where I expected to find Ben and Gabby right in the middle of breakfast. They weren't, but I had mine anyway, trying to hurry up, and sending Ben a text asking if he'd already headed off exploring on an earlier bus. Finishing breakfast, the reply came through: "I've only just got up." So much for the exploration, then, as we ended up on the 11:33 bus into Osnabrück, and a determined march directly towards Club N8. It was, as it turned out, nothing like Ultima Ratio had been. Rather than being set in a converted Victorian-era (or whatever the German equivalent is) factory, Club N8 resembled more of an enlarged Portakabin from the outside. And with not long to go until the doors opened, there were hardly any people outside, whereas the entire crowd had already gathered outside the Turbinenhalle when I turned up there with more time to spare. So, seeing the spare crowd and being rather concerned that the festival would be a wash-out, we visited the nearby bakery for various not-just-bready-but-quite-curranty-too delicacies, with Gabby picking up a milkshake which was somewhere along the lines of thin custard. Remembering the possible sanitary fate that might have befallen me at Ultima Ratio, I'd decided to steer well clear of any liquids before the gig, bar the milk on my cereals and a small glass of orange juice at breakfast. Definitely no multiple rounds of coffee this time.
The first disappointment, for Ben at least, was that The Vision Bleak had pulled out and been replaced by some (for us) total unknowns in the form of Stinna og Stora - which I believe to be Norwegian for "Little and Large" and which I thought for a minute may have been some kind of comedy act. Rather more confusing was the apparent lack of any entrance to a stage area. There were toilets, a cloakroom and a fair few merchandise stalls - but nowhere, apparently, for the bands to perform. Until, that was, they opened a well-disguised door to the stage area half an hour later, and as is the way with German crowds, everyone flocked immediately to the bar - other than a couple who I believe to be Dutch, who joined me at the front, overlooking a small stage that looked more like a church hall in some piss-ant village in rural Wiltshire than a set of boards soon to be graced by Finland's finest. Almost immediately, STINNA OG STORA took the stage to almost no welcome whatsoever, the potential crowd still busy with the far more pressing business of buying extremely expensive beer at €2.50 for a 300 ml mug (with Wacken-style Becherpfand on top, of course...). Far from being in any way Norwegian, Stinna og Stora are Osnabrück natives, presumably drafted in at the last minute. They don't do anything remotely original but did at least provide half an hour of neck muscle warming. I had to take advantage of this as the next band on, MIDNATTSOL, were always likely to be a bit static. They came across mainly as a vehicle for Carmen Espenæs to wear a white dress, look pretty (having not been cursed with her older sister's Mäenpää-esque beak) and occasionally sing, with the result being not a million miles away from what Nightwish might have been in the early days had it not been for Tarja's eardrum-shattering shriek. They came they saw, they buggered off again, having failed to provide some extra comedy with the possibility of Carmen falling over her rapidly-collapsing stilettos. No word of a lie, I was honestly looking forward to writing about how someone so small could make such a resounding crash on the stage, but it was not to be...
So the job of getting the day started properly the way Wolfchant had done so well at Ultima Ratio, fell to another of the bands that had played that day: HEIDEVOLK. The blue and white Gelderland shields were out in force, and although there were no swords to clack them loudly with this time, the contrast between Heidevolk and the two bands that had gone before them could not have been sharper. Since Ultima Ratio they've been beefed up with a bigger and better album in the shape of Walhalla Wacht, from which most of the set was taken, and have a new violin-playing woman, though, as with her predecessor, she spent most of the set standing at the side of the stage waiting for something to do, leaving the main job to the huge, hairy men decked out in their historical re-enactment gear throwing themselves around the stage as if they were wrestling bears. There wasn't even time for a break, Het Gelders Volkslied having been dropped in favour of the likes of Wodan Heerst (all eight minutes and Thor knows how many riffs of it) and Saksenland, with valiant attempts at singalongs to the mostly incomprehensible Dutch lyrics. Of course, they had to finish up with what appears to be the only track anyone behind the front row knew, Vulgaris Magistralis, which isn't even one of theirs... still, with the day finally taking off the way I always knew it would, it was left to another Ultima Ratio band, the blue-faced Ulstermen of WAYLANDER, to keep the momentum up. Hopes were high, given that they've always been better live than on record, but things didn't turn out so well. The volume had noticeably dropped during a not-exactly-confident soundcheck, and they spent most of the set rooted to the spot, only Ciaran and Dave not appearing to suffer a crisis of confidence. Ciaran helpfully pointed out that they'd just lost a guitarist a week ago, and his brother was filling in for them having learnt the set in only a few days. Under the circumstances, then, I'd say they coped reasonably, having picked the best bits of Reawakening Pride Once Lost and the seven-years-in-gestation Honour Amongst Chaos to throw at us - it's just that I can't help thinking they'd have been better off trading places with Heidevolk, as they were shown up somewhat by the Dutch onslaught that had gone before them. I also tried to ignore the idiot standing near me who was already massively drunk and flailing his hair all over the place with a flagrant disregard for whose faces he was whipping at the time. It wasn't easy.
More Irish metal followed, this time from south of the border, courtesy of MAEL MÓRDHA. For a band as gloomy as they have to be for Old Man Ben to give them any attention, they appeared to be in high spirits, though maybe that was due to the bottle of Bunratty not-quite-mead they were passing round themselves during the soundcheck. They chose not to introduce themselves, thundering straight into Cluain Tarbh instead, though Roibéard did at least manage to growl "Wir sind Mael Mórdha aus Irland... and that's all my German used up, so I'll have to talk to you in English" though his mass of facial hair afterwards. Spurning most of their really slow and gloomy tunes (including, unfortunately, Winds of One Thousand Winters), they were all far more animated than I'd expected them to be - certainly more than Waylander had been, Roibéard spending about a third of the set hovering over the front row drumming up support for both his own band and his fellow Irish minions, treating us to the news of an imminent new album and a preview of From The Lungs Of Death (as I think it was called), even joining us in the crowd during the traditional closer, Realms of Insanity... and finally rewarding those of us in the front row with a mouthful of mead each - a fine gesture, even though I knew damn well it was just white wine with honey mixed in. As with all the other bands so far, just about the entire crowd deserted the stage in search of the bar - which meant a half-decent opportunity for the only toilet break of the day without fear of losing that precious place at the front.
I'll admit, when the line-up was first announced and contained ARKONA high up on the bill, I was worried. It was, after all, not likely to be the Polish black metal band whose rather dodgy politics and repeated exaltation by Alex Kurtagic would not have seen them welcomed into Germany with open arms. Predictably, it was to be the Russians, who I should write correctly as АРКОНА, who would be playing for us, and that presented a problem - I'd heard them only described as "female fronted metal", giving me all sorts of ideas that I was about to be subjected to yet another Nightwish clone. Now, for all that I may say "I'm never wrong", there are some times where I'm actually glad to be wrong. This was one of those times. I couldn't shake off my initial misgivings at the beginning of the set, where the opening chords were played at somewhere approaching half volume and came across as a Russified one-calorie diet Korpiklaani peddled by the likes of Тролль Гнёт Ель, but within a minute or so, the band exploded into life, aided mostly by the incredibly attractive blonde lass who bounced onto the stage and never stood still for the next 45 minutes - with not a hint of a Tarja shriek to be found. Never mind the rest of them, it was her boundless enthusiasm for the task in hand that won me over; the way she flung herself around with a seemingly limitless supply of energy reminded me of Eluveitie's departed Kirder twins... and who knows where, or if, we'll ever see them again. I realised why the Dutch couple that had stood next to me for the entire gig so far had decided to grab their place early, even if they did leave pointedly afterwards instead of staying for the main events...
It had been five and a half years since I'd last seen THYRFING, and been converted to their cause within all of 30 seconds. This time round, after two more albums that have drifted progressively further away from the incredible sound of Urkraft and Valdr Galga, it's unlikely their set this time round would have had the same effect. Still, The Voyager was a good enough start - for everyone except for the teenager standing to the left of me who was being constantly elbowed with severe force by the twat who'd barged his way up the front during Waylander, and had to spend the next twelve minutes or so resisting the obvious urge to turn round and belt the offending tosser square in the face. Crowd problems or not, it soon became obvious that the set was going to be heavily weighted towards the later albums. Yes, they have a new album to promote, and maybe the later albums suit Jens' voice more than the Viking-era compositions, but I have to sympathise with Peter sitting there behind his keyboard with very little to do, until the seventh track of the set, Ur Askan Ett Rike, the first time they deigned to play anything from before Vansinnesvisor. Even then, his keyboards were barely audible. I was equally unimpressed with Jens' mock slitting of his wrists and throat during Far Åt Helvete - he used to be in Naglfar, for fuck's sake, not Bullet For My Valentine! It was left to Mjölner to save the day, leaving the best until last - where Peter's lack of volume on the keyboards was joined by Patrik's guitar also failing to deliver any significant inroads into the wall of noise created by the rest of the band, leaving both the riffs that had made me sit up and take immediate notice all those years ago completely drowned out. It's what you might call a wasted opportunity.
TURISAS, recently, have also been staring down the barrel of wasted opportunities - I've seen them a few times recently and just about everything they've done, across several countries and several tours, has been identical each time. Were they going to break the mould today? Not exactly, but despite the somewhat predictable setlist, that sense of fun that they used to bring so much more of to the party looked to be on its way back. Hints about Olli's "violinist on a mission" spiel from a few years ago are returning to his solos, Nygård has started flirting with Netta on stage in a way that he could never have done with previous accordionists, and the gaping hole in the sound that was left by an unfortunate road accident some time back is being patched up. Add in a furious Nygård rant about the dismal quality of beer in the United States in comparison to what is available in Germany (although I could have pointed out a few places he could have looked to find better beer...) and it was clear they were turning the form book around. The main mistake, though, was for Nygård to introduce Miklagard Overture with: "Do you want to hear something really big? Something truly epic?" Well, yes. But he really should have reminded himself which band was coming up next...
It is said that nobody should ever bring a knife to a gunfight. If this festival was a gunfight, then Stinna og Stora and Midnattsol turned up with knives. Thyrfing brought a pistol, and most of the others came armed with machine guns of various descriptions. But all these were to be useless when faced with MOONSORROW, who had brought a tank. Once I'd confirmed that the twat who'd done his damndest to ruin Waylander and Thyrfing for half the crowd had vanished, the hint was given that Moonsorrow were going to be unstoppable. It hadn't been totally clear in the run-up to the gig, but their headline slot was confirmed ahead of Turisas; Mitja celebrated by including flashes of Blood Red, The Wicker Man and Master Of Puppets in his soundcheck. They disappeared offstage... and all it took was one loud BONG and the sound of the sea to indicate what they'd be opening with. This time, though, in front of an attentive German crowd, instead of those who may be casual fans, there would be no splitting up of Tulimyrsky. Twelve and a half minutes of the first four chapters passed in what seemed like seconds. I had to listen carefully to what would happen next... and, sure enough, Mitja launched into the "sea shanty" that made up the next seven minutes - the part that went astray at Bloodstock. Would they take us all the way? Surely they wouldn't let us down? Not a hint of it. And so it came to be that Ville only announced that they were Moonsorrow, and that they were from Finland, a full thirty minutes into the set. My neck was already destroyed. My head was destroyed. I could almost not believe what I'd just witnessed. And as if to provide an extra Brucie bonus, Mitja's guitar sound had been clear enough that I'd noticed an exact mirror of the opening chord progression halfway through the sea shanty section - after some fifty-odd plays of the studio version, so if there's still anyone out there who thinks that Tulimyrsky shouldn't be considered as one huge half-hour track... there's the evidence against your erroneous beliefs. So, what could they do now? Barely was there time for a break before they romped into Raunioilla, which I'd last heard them play live on that triumphant evening at Wacken a year and a half ago, and which sounded no worse off with Janne's singing voice than with the Fat Man. They spent the rest of the set pedalling backwards through their albums, "finishing" with that favourite of the casual observer that is Pakanajuhla, and which I genuinely believe they'll drop one day to fit in something far more ambitious. And as if to reward the true fans in the crowd for our enthusiasm, they came back for a generous helping of Jotunheim. What other band could fill a 75-minute set with only six tracks and still make every single second mesmerising to the point of disbelief? I could only have been happier if they'd further cut down the number of tracks in the setlist and shoved Tuleen Ajettu Maa in there instead. Truly this band is the gift that keeps on giving.
And so, completely shattered and with only a single mouthful of any liquid of any kind since I'd left the hotel thirteen hours previously, I rewarded myself with a couple of beers. Never mind that the total cost was five euros for little more than an imperial pint, when I was that desperate for sustenance, that was the best beer I'd tasted in months. Redeeming the Pfand tokens at the cloakroom was a bit of a hassle, though, and it gave me a chance to witness a particularly ugly scene between two girls who were spiralling into a cat fight. "I don't understand German!" screeched one, in a none-too-English accent - so I have no idea where she was from, but I'd recognised her earlier as being far more friendly than this during Heidevolk's set, so maybe she was Dutch and some suppressed resentment at the Nazi occupation of Holland had boiled to the surface, as her parting line to the blonde German girl was: "You should have died in Auschwitz!" Charming. I figured I'd be better off outside where there was pizza available, and maybe I could find Ben and Gabby...
...who, it turns out, had scarpered. I was about to send them a text when I saw that they'd already sent me one, from inside McDonald's, with the time showing as "00:15". They had left just as Moonsorrow were wrapping up Raunioilla. And in fully justified retribution for this act of sheer unforgivable sacrilege, they had been chased out of said McDonald's by the local chavs, for the crime of being English. I was, of course, thoroughly unsympathetic as I met them shortly afterwards at Neumarkt. And grinned to myself at their deserved misfortune.
Still, we decided to find more late night beer, the Rampendahl having been in full flow the night before until well after midnight. Gabby had found what appeared to be a traditional Bierkeller, and took us all in its general direction, only to find on arrival that it was a hotel that was closed for the night. We were in the general vicinity of the Rampendahl, though, so we thought we'd visit again to give the weißbier a go, previous lifting of glasses notwithstanding. Unfortunately, the door had been locked from the inside, despite the presence of a healthy crowd. So we had to make do with the rather chavvy-looking dive next door, where the beer at least looked interesting. It was at this point that I realised I needed to improve my German beer jargon, as having ordered "Alt-Schluss" thinking it was a different variety of Altbier, to my horror, half the glass was filled with Coca-Cola, in a way I'd only ever seen done at Graspop. I wasn't going to waste it, so I downed it while Ben and Gabby made up their minds what to do. It tasted mainly like Coca-Cola that had gone off, with very little hint that it had ever contained any beer. Arse. The other two decided that it was best at this point to cut our losses and retreat to the hotel. Cue another five euros each for the cab - but even taking these two taxi rides into account, we were still better off financially than taking places in a hotel nearer to the city centre.
25.01.2009: A GREAT MAN'S RETURN
There was no rush to get up in the morning, so I refused to set the alarm on my phone and was woke up shortly before ten by a message from Ben. This time, the happy couple had beaten me to it and were already downstairs devouring breakfast, having completely missed out on it the day before. I managed to grab enough in the time to keep me going for a few hours, and discuss the battle plans, before returning for a much-needed shower. The downside to yesterday's late start was that there had been no time for any exploration; on a Sunday, very little, if anything, was going to be open. We did at least know where to go, though; for half of Winternoise, Ben and Gabby had disappeared to do some preliminary reconnaissance, returning only for Mael Mórdha. Seems like a waste of half the ticket price if you ask me, but still... we headed for the area around the cathedral, where - very appropriately - there was an impressive sculpture that could have been used as artwork for the next Cathedral album, involving a man in a toga, a lion that looked like it was about to cry, and an enormous scythe with bony fingers that was busy harvesting heads. Clearly this was the product of one too many Oktoberfestbiers...
We'd decided on getting a proper lunch as opposed to scraping together a Bifi Roll and a packet of Grills from the nearest petrol station, and as luck would have it, slap bang next to the cathedral was a restaurant serving a grab-it-yourself buffet lunch - some of which was served hot - for 15 euros a head. Not bad, we thought. And sure enough, there was a variety of sausages, a million different ways of serving potatoes, rice, soup, salads for the Puritan Vegetable Folk, and a spicy soup which appeared to be similar to minestrone with with blocks of what I assume to be tofu - which is as textureless and as formless as I'd always expected to be, making it obviously the food of choice for self-flagellating vegans. I had enough sausage and potato to fill me up until gone midnight, or so I thought, but still found room for a couple of rounds of dessert. The only disappointment was that the bottles of locally-produced mead they were selling for €6.50 a bottle had long since sold out... no wonder, at that price. That is a great deal, and then some.
Leaving Osnabrück some time around two in the afternoon, we had only one mission on the way back: to avoid the same trap I'd fallen into twice on the way back from Wacken, and not turn off at the wrong point of the A1/A35 in Holland. This would allow us to film the psychedelic "sharp left turn" roadsigns at the junction where we were actually supposed to turn off, which have the arrows appearing to be moving. Of course, it had to be filmed in daylight, and as there was no rain and no immediate threat of falling off the road, and it was a Sunday with very light traffic, and I was in Germany, I thought I'd floor it. I will find out one day how close the indicated 135 mph (in a diesel!) was to the real figure. So, that helped up reach the target in time, and I'm pleased to say, the mission was successful... and as soon as I have some decent video editing software, I'll post a suitably edited version.
Some may question my decision to make a deliberate wrong turning on the Antwerp ring road that would take us towards Brussels instead of Gent. I knew what I was doing, though. All the way through the French leg of my Epykkk Euro-Tour, I'd been passing a ton of Quick burger joints without ever going into one. It's a French company, but has a few branches in Belgium, and I distinctly remembered one on the motorway from Brussels to Gent, which I'd passed on the way back from Metal Camp only because I'd had lunch about an hour before. I wouldn't miss the chance this time, though, and drove like a granny as soon as I'd left the Brussels ring road so as not to miss the turning. Not that I needed to go far, as Groot-Bijgaarden was almost on the junction itself. To summarise: Quick isn't quite up there with Burger King, but knocks McDonald's into next week. Their Big Bacon is the only burger I've ever had from one of these fast food joints which is served in a brown bun with that bizarre hybrid of ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard that calls itself burger sauce. And they don;t put salt on the chips - deliberately. If I'm in this neck of the woods again, I'll be back. Although I'm not sure I needed to see the rather disturbing cartoons of inanely grinning cartoon characters picking up their burgers that were depicted on the bag. Even then, it had nothing on the truly terrifying just-let-out-of-the-asylum cartoon pizza chef on the pizza boxes that I picked up in St. Malo...
With this detour, we ended up taking it so easy that we'd arrived at Dunkirk at 10:30, with half an hour to go before the recommended check-in time, without having to kill further time in parked up in one of the towns along the A18/A16 where everything would be closed. The crossing, at midnight, was perfectly smooth, and as the British leg of the trip was as uneventful as could be expected for that time of night, held up only by the need to stop for a break just outside Banbury, there's no point mentioning that; it was six in the morning by the time we arrived back in Nottingham, but fortunately I'd had the foresight to tell the men of Attenborough Heating that I'd rather have them visit on the Tuesday for my imminent boiler replacement job rather than only two and a half hours from my return.
With a bit of luck, there will be more people for a similar event that will no doubt emerge later in the year. Paganfest will come to the UK; Heidenfest probably won't, and there's always the possibility of a better line-up for Ultima Ratio that 2008 provided.
And now for the awards!
A foaming stein of Osnabrück's finest Rampendahl Spezialbier is held up to: the people of Derby CAMRA who first alerted me to the Rampendahl; the Rampendahl itself; Ali Baba's kebab shop; the staff of Hotel Busch-Atter; filming the psychedelic roadsign; Quick turned out to be a success; Ville Sorvali; Mitja Harvilahti; Janne Perttilä; Markus Eurén; Marko Tarvonen.
A skinful of stale ram's piss is thrown at: whoever decided the bus to and from Atter should only run every hour; German chavs; the hair-flailing tosser - learn a bit of self-control, dickwad; "you should have died in Auschwitz!"; Jens Rydén's teenage antics.
I will use the style of awards from Ultima Ratio as opposed to Wacken, Bloodstock or any of the other multi-day jobs, which gives us:
Band Of The Festival: do you really need me to repeat myself?
Triumph Through Adversity: Relatively speaking, Waylander, in that they actually managed to play at all.
Surprise of the Festival: Слава Аркона!
Most Bizarre Instrument: Roibéard Ó Bogail's horn; I thought it was for drinking from.
Most Notable Absence: The Vision Bleak. Their replacements weren't up to much.
Biggest Waste Of Oxygen: The aforementioned tossbag who couldn't keep his elbows to himself and must have come close to a proper decking.
And finally, those all-important setlists:
Heidevolk: (incomplete)
De Strijdlust Is Geboren / Wodan Heerst ... Walhalla Wacht / Saksenland / Vulgaris Magistralis
Waylander: (helpfully donated by Dark Angel's Blog, which unfortunately couldn't provide the same information for Heidevolk)
King Of The Fairies / Walk With Honour / Beyond The Ninth Wave / A Hero's Lament / As The Deities Clash / Born To The Fight
Mael Mórdha: (also donated by Dark Angel's Blog)
Cluain Tarbh / Curse Of The Bard / From The Lungs Of Death (?) / Windows Of Madness / Pauper Of Souls / Gealtacht Mael Mórdha / Realms Of Insanity
Thyrfing:
The Voyager / Kaos Återkomst / En Sista Litania / Från Stormens Öga / Fat Åt Helvete / Jag Spår Fördärv / Ur Askan Ett Rike / Isolation / Digerdöden / Mjölner
Turisas:
As Torches Rise / A Portage To The Unknown / To Holmgard And Beyond / Cursed Be Iron / One More / In The Court Of Jarisleif / Miklagard Overture // Rasputin / Battle Metal
Moonsorrow:
Tulimyrsky (the full 30 minutes) / Raunioilla (parts I/II) / Aurinko Ja Kuu / Sankaritarina (8 min. edit) / Pakanajuhla // Jotunheim
Crossposted everywhere, which in this day and age only means metal_community and heathenforay.
WINTERNOISE
CLUB N8, OSNABRÜCK, GERMANY
SATURDAY 24 JANUARY 2009
Guilty parties: Shorthair Ben and Gabby, who were instrumental in half the story...
Gemma and four others came from Cambridge, rather later than us.
No grovelling apologies if half the links are in German - these are German hostelries we are dealing with here!
Click the pictures to enlarge them. They're all 1024 × 768 pixels; that should be big enough for anyone.
22/23.01.2009: SET SAIL TO PLUNDER
A while back, Ben was quite annoyed that I wanted to confirm that he was as dedicated to the trip as I was, getting incredibly defensive when I asked if he'd bought a ticket as opposed to just talking about it. 10 pm on Thursday, 22nd January showed him exactly why I'd been so forceful in my inquisitions. The turnout was poor. For a trip that was supposed to be seven of us, at least, in two cars, three people in one car was the final result, which further justifies my long-held belief that people talking about going to an event, whether it be on this side of the Channel or not, translates to a rather lower number who will actually go. Actually, it's a wonder that any of us made it at all; I'd had to order two tickets, as the first one, ordered at the end of November, never arrived - and we all know which side of the Channel had managed to lose it; it turned out Ben and Gabby had had equal problems getting hold of their tickets well.
Three of us in one car meant a rather easier job in organising transport and accommodation, though. We'd booked less than a week in advance, so £42 for the ferry was a great deal - even if it meant leaving Dover at four in the morning. Accommodation was rather trickier; Gemma's party were booked into Hotel Sieme, which had run out of places, and the hostels in and around Osnabrück appeared to be on the tricky side of impossible to book. So, after some discussion, we settled on the impressive-looking but only two-star Hotel Busch-Atter... which we further discovered, shortly after booking, wasn't actually in Osnabrück, but about five miles away in Atter, an almost-separate village. A railway station called "Oslo Sud-Asker" had caused similar confusion almost three years ago on the Norway trip, giving no obvious impression how far away Asker was from the centre of Oslo...
But 10 pm arrived, Gabby parked her car on my drive to give any of the local chavs the idea that there really was someone at home, and part two of the "Someone Doesn't Want Us To Get To Winternoise" saga kicked off, with the drive down to Dover plagued by a constant deluge of rain. Despite setting off well before 11, and needing to check in at three, we only made it with half an hour to spare... which was rather less than I'd been banking on. Sleeping on the boat was as impossible as ever, necessitating an hour-long stop somewhere in Belgium which meant I'd be able to complete the trip, and Ben and Gabby could share a baguette (with obvious outcome) and annoy the locals with the incessant pinging of Sonic the Hedgehog picking up rings on Gabby's Nintendo DS (and who'd have seen that coming a few years ago?) The other two, of course, had picked up every opportunity for a nap in the back of the car, despite the constant blare of Windir, Suidakra and Clutch, and the constant battering of the rain. Most of the time when they were both awake, it seems I'd look in my rear view mirror to see the two lovebirds clamped all over each others' faces. Cheers for those timely reminders, eh? Anyway. It seems I'd have been better off timewise taking a break a bit further up the road, outside Antwerp, where the ring road in the direction we wanted to take was blocked solid. Sitting in a queue for half an hour wasn't much fun, and eventually I decided to take the other direction, which would involve a toll bridge... that the Belgian authorities had decided to let us all through for free, and that's not something that would ever been seen on a certain construction just outside Dartford. Despite this generous gesture, that didn't stop us from being further slowed down by an unexpected diversion towards Rotterdam, where we crossed an inland piece of sea which made it quite obvious how much trouble Holland will be in if the global warmingists turn out to be right all along and sea levels rise by seven metres.
So, detours and breaks taken care of, it was getting on for five by the time we crossed the German border, and almost six when we arrived (with very few navigational problems) at the hotel, which appeared both inside and out to be even more impressive than the pictures and deserving of far more than its meagre two stars - as you can all no doubt see above. I checked out the bus situation while Ben and Gabby adorned their room with more blankets than was necessary, and armed with CAMRA's Good Beer Guide for Germany, we had out first beer of the trip - in my case, the marvellously dark Köstritzer Schwarzbier, from a Thüringen brewery that spent 45 years shut away in East Germany, which was a fine start, though given the brewery's size, I wonder if it was directed towards quantity over quality during the communist period. One down and plenty to go, we boarded the last bus for two hours to take us to the Neumarkt in central Osnabrück, and onto a random walk through the city centre, which we figured would take us to a pub sooner rather than later - in sharp contrast to the previous miserable findings in Oberhausen. And there we were thinking that with Osnabrück being a university city, as had been repeatedly hammered into me at GCSE age by my bright yellow Zickzack textbook, pubs would be easy to find. There weren't as many as I'd expected, though, and the first pub we decided to venture into may well have been the roughest in the whole of Osnabrück, if the punters at the bar were anything to go by. The woman at the bar was pleasant enough, though, even if she did describe Ben and Gabby as "kindergarten" - yes, I heard that, never mind that everyone else in the pub was 40-plus. The weißbier was merely Paulaner; I had a chance to sample Frankenheim Altbier as well, given that Gabby drank so incredibly slowly. We soon made our escape; further bars, less worth mentioning, were almost as hard to find as in Oberhausen, and when we found one that looked promising but served only the likes of Stella and Carlsberg, we retreated briefly to Ali Baba's kebab shop for The Greatest Kebab Ever™ - a chicken döner with cheese sauce, similar to what might once have been seen on Drop The Dead Donkey. Not that Ben would have known, due to his preference for being Puritan Vegetable Folk. While in Ali Baba's we decided to find the one bar that I'd been recommended to visit while at the Derby Winter Beer Festival, and also by the Good Beer Guide - Osnabrück's own brewpub, the Rampendahl. Ben regaled me with tales of how he'd imagined a German Bierkeller to be, and so far, none of the pubs had lived up to his imagination. The Rampendahl was closest, it being decorated in green-painted steel, with a bar area and upstairs balcony being made entirely of wood. I suspect that what he'd had in mind was more of a Bavarian scene, something like Bamberg's famous Schlenkerla, home of wonderful Rauchbier and a place which I really must visit someday. The brewing area was fully integrated into the pub, and as luck would have it, the only available seating was right by the brewing kit - where a tour was being conducted for some interested members of the German equivalent of CAMRA.
It was worth the effort finding it, as much Spezial (the dark one) and Hell (the pilsener) was drunk, with a free helping of bread rolls and a sausage-shaped blob of... something to spread on it which appeared to be made almost entirely of lard. I would have stayed for a weißbier as well, but my stomach was starting to protest, and Gabby's assertion that she was too tired to continue to function indicated that it was time to knock off. How she'd have fared if she'd had to drive as well is beyond me. The two of them decided to grab a couple of "souvenirs" while nobody was looking... and were good enough to pick me up one as well. I say "good", although there's a fair few people on the moral crusaders' side who might not agree. Still, infractions unnoticed by the bar staff, we piled into a taxi that took us back to way out in the sticks for a fiver each, and prepared for an early morning in which we would explore Osnabrück before the main event...
24.01.2009: WINTERNOISE
...only things didn't work out quite as planned. I'd not set my phone to German time, not realising that I'd be using it as an alarm clock for the morning, so when I finally woke up and thought that it was a bit light for 7:30 in the morning, it's because it was actually 8:30. Cue a very hasty shower and a charge downstairs where I expected to find Ben and Gabby right in the middle of breakfast. They weren't, but I had mine anyway, trying to hurry up, and sending Ben a text asking if he'd already headed off exploring on an earlier bus. Finishing breakfast, the reply came through: "I've only just got up." So much for the exploration, then, as we ended up on the 11:33 bus into Osnabrück, and a determined march directly towards Club N8. It was, as it turned out, nothing like Ultima Ratio had been. Rather than being set in a converted Victorian-era (or whatever the German equivalent is) factory, Club N8 resembled more of an enlarged Portakabin from the outside. And with not long to go until the doors opened, there were hardly any people outside, whereas the entire crowd had already gathered outside the Turbinenhalle when I turned up there with more time to spare. So, seeing the spare crowd and being rather concerned that the festival would be a wash-out, we visited the nearby bakery for various not-just-bready-but-quite-curranty-too delicacies, with Gabby picking up a milkshake which was somewhere along the lines of thin custard. Remembering the possible sanitary fate that might have befallen me at Ultima Ratio, I'd decided to steer well clear of any liquids before the gig, bar the milk on my cereals and a small glass of orange juice at breakfast. Definitely no multiple rounds of coffee this time.
The first disappointment, for Ben at least, was that The Vision Bleak had pulled out and been replaced by some (for us) total unknowns in the form of Stinna og Stora - which I believe to be Norwegian for "Little and Large" and which I thought for a minute may have been some kind of comedy act. Rather more confusing was the apparent lack of any entrance to a stage area. There were toilets, a cloakroom and a fair few merchandise stalls - but nowhere, apparently, for the bands to perform. Until, that was, they opened a well-disguised door to the stage area half an hour later, and as is the way with German crowds, everyone flocked immediately to the bar - other than a couple who I believe to be Dutch, who joined me at the front, overlooking a small stage that looked more like a church hall in some piss-ant village in rural Wiltshire than a set of boards soon to be graced by Finland's finest. Almost immediately, STINNA OG STORA took the stage to almost no welcome whatsoever, the potential crowd still busy with the far more pressing business of buying extremely expensive beer at €2.50 for a 300 ml mug (with Wacken-style Becherpfand on top, of course...). Far from being in any way Norwegian, Stinna og Stora are Osnabrück natives, presumably drafted in at the last minute. They don't do anything remotely original but did at least provide half an hour of neck muscle warming. I had to take advantage of this as the next band on, MIDNATTSOL, were always likely to be a bit static. They came across mainly as a vehicle for Carmen Espenæs to wear a white dress, look pretty (having not been cursed with her older sister's Mäenpää-esque beak) and occasionally sing, with the result being not a million miles away from what Nightwish might have been in the early days had it not been for Tarja's eardrum-shattering shriek. They came they saw, they buggered off again, having failed to provide some extra comedy with the possibility of Carmen falling over her rapidly-collapsing stilettos. No word of a lie, I was honestly looking forward to writing about how someone so small could make such a resounding crash on the stage, but it was not to be...
So the job of getting the day started properly the way Wolfchant had done so well at Ultima Ratio, fell to another of the bands that had played that day: HEIDEVOLK. The blue and white Gelderland shields were out in force, and although there were no swords to clack them loudly with this time, the contrast between Heidevolk and the two bands that had gone before them could not have been sharper. Since Ultima Ratio they've been beefed up with a bigger and better album in the shape of Walhalla Wacht, from which most of the set was taken, and have a new violin-playing woman, though, as with her predecessor, she spent most of the set standing at the side of the stage waiting for something to do, leaving the main job to the huge, hairy men decked out in their historical re-enactment gear throwing themselves around the stage as if they were wrestling bears. There wasn't even time for a break, Het Gelders Volkslied having been dropped in favour of the likes of Wodan Heerst (all eight minutes and Thor knows how many riffs of it) and Saksenland, with valiant attempts at singalongs to the mostly incomprehensible Dutch lyrics. Of course, they had to finish up with what appears to be the only track anyone behind the front row knew, Vulgaris Magistralis, which isn't even one of theirs... still, with the day finally taking off the way I always knew it would, it was left to another Ultima Ratio band, the blue-faced Ulstermen of WAYLANDER, to keep the momentum up. Hopes were high, given that they've always been better live than on record, but things didn't turn out so well. The volume had noticeably dropped during a not-exactly-confident soundcheck, and they spent most of the set rooted to the spot, only Ciaran and Dave not appearing to suffer a crisis of confidence. Ciaran helpfully pointed out that they'd just lost a guitarist a week ago, and his brother was filling in for them having learnt the set in only a few days. Under the circumstances, then, I'd say they coped reasonably, having picked the best bits of Reawakening Pride Once Lost and the seven-years-in-gestation Honour Amongst Chaos to throw at us - it's just that I can't help thinking they'd have been better off trading places with Heidevolk, as they were shown up somewhat by the Dutch onslaught that had gone before them. I also tried to ignore the idiot standing near me who was already massively drunk and flailing his hair all over the place with a flagrant disregard for whose faces he was whipping at the time. It wasn't easy.
More Irish metal followed, this time from south of the border, courtesy of MAEL MÓRDHA. For a band as gloomy as they have to be for Old Man Ben to give them any attention, they appeared to be in high spirits, though maybe that was due to the bottle of Bunratty not-quite-mead they were passing round themselves during the soundcheck. They chose not to introduce themselves, thundering straight into Cluain Tarbh instead, though Roibéard did at least manage to growl "Wir sind Mael Mórdha aus Irland... and that's all my German used up, so I'll have to talk to you in English" though his mass of facial hair afterwards. Spurning most of their really slow and gloomy tunes (including, unfortunately, Winds of One Thousand Winters), they were all far more animated than I'd expected them to be - certainly more than Waylander had been, Roibéard spending about a third of the set hovering over the front row drumming up support for both his own band and his fellow Irish minions, treating us to the news of an imminent new album and a preview of From The Lungs Of Death (as I think it was called), even joining us in the crowd during the traditional closer, Realms of Insanity... and finally rewarding those of us in the front row with a mouthful of mead each - a fine gesture, even though I knew damn well it was just white wine with honey mixed in. As with all the other bands so far, just about the entire crowd deserted the stage in search of the bar - which meant a half-decent opportunity for the only toilet break of the day without fear of losing that precious place at the front.
I'll admit, when the line-up was first announced and contained ARKONA high up on the bill, I was worried. It was, after all, not likely to be the Polish black metal band whose rather dodgy politics and repeated exaltation by Alex Kurtagic would not have seen them welcomed into Germany with open arms. Predictably, it was to be the Russians, who I should write correctly as АРКОНА, who would be playing for us, and that presented a problem - I'd heard them only described as "female fronted metal", giving me all sorts of ideas that I was about to be subjected to yet another Nightwish clone. Now, for all that I may say "I'm never wrong", there are some times where I'm actually glad to be wrong. This was one of those times. I couldn't shake off my initial misgivings at the beginning of the set, where the opening chords were played at somewhere approaching half volume and came across as a Russified one-calorie diet Korpiklaani peddled by the likes of Тролль Гнёт Ель, but within a minute or so, the band exploded into life, aided mostly by the incredibly attractive blonde lass who bounced onto the stage and never stood still for the next 45 minutes - with not a hint of a Tarja shriek to be found. Never mind the rest of them, it was her boundless enthusiasm for the task in hand that won me over; the way she flung herself around with a seemingly limitless supply of energy reminded me of Eluveitie's departed Kirder twins... and who knows where, or if, we'll ever see them again. I realised why the Dutch couple that had stood next to me for the entire gig so far had decided to grab their place early, even if they did leave pointedly afterwards instead of staying for the main events...
It had been five and a half years since I'd last seen THYRFING, and been converted to their cause within all of 30 seconds. This time round, after two more albums that have drifted progressively further away from the incredible sound of Urkraft and Valdr Galga, it's unlikely their set this time round would have had the same effect. Still, The Voyager was a good enough start - for everyone except for the teenager standing to the left of me who was being constantly elbowed with severe force by the twat who'd barged his way up the front during Waylander, and had to spend the next twelve minutes or so resisting the obvious urge to turn round and belt the offending tosser square in the face. Crowd problems or not, it soon became obvious that the set was going to be heavily weighted towards the later albums. Yes, they have a new album to promote, and maybe the later albums suit Jens' voice more than the Viking-era compositions, but I have to sympathise with Peter sitting there behind his keyboard with very little to do, until the seventh track of the set, Ur Askan Ett Rike, the first time they deigned to play anything from before Vansinnesvisor. Even then, his keyboards were barely audible. I was equally unimpressed with Jens' mock slitting of his wrists and throat during Far Åt Helvete - he used to be in Naglfar, for fuck's sake, not Bullet For My Valentine! It was left to Mjölner to save the day, leaving the best until last - where Peter's lack of volume on the keyboards was joined by Patrik's guitar also failing to deliver any significant inroads into the wall of noise created by the rest of the band, leaving both the riffs that had made me sit up and take immediate notice all those years ago completely drowned out. It's what you might call a wasted opportunity.
TURISAS, recently, have also been staring down the barrel of wasted opportunities - I've seen them a few times recently and just about everything they've done, across several countries and several tours, has been identical each time. Were they going to break the mould today? Not exactly, but despite the somewhat predictable setlist, that sense of fun that they used to bring so much more of to the party looked to be on its way back. Hints about Olli's "violinist on a mission" spiel from a few years ago are returning to his solos, Nygård has started flirting with Netta on stage in a way that he could never have done with previous accordionists, and the gaping hole in the sound that was left by an unfortunate road accident some time back is being patched up. Add in a furious Nygård rant about the dismal quality of beer in the United States in comparison to what is available in Germany (although I could have pointed out a few places he could have looked to find better beer...) and it was clear they were turning the form book around. The main mistake, though, was for Nygård to introduce Miklagard Overture with: "Do you want to hear something really big? Something truly epic?" Well, yes. But he really should have reminded himself which band was coming up next...
It is said that nobody should ever bring a knife to a gunfight. If this festival was a gunfight, then Stinna og Stora and Midnattsol turned up with knives. Thyrfing brought a pistol, and most of the others came armed with machine guns of various descriptions. But all these were to be useless when faced with MOONSORROW, who had brought a tank. Once I'd confirmed that the twat who'd done his damndest to ruin Waylander and Thyrfing for half the crowd had vanished, the hint was given that Moonsorrow were going to be unstoppable. It hadn't been totally clear in the run-up to the gig, but their headline slot was confirmed ahead of Turisas; Mitja celebrated by including flashes of Blood Red, The Wicker Man and Master Of Puppets in his soundcheck. They disappeared offstage... and all it took was one loud BONG and the sound of the sea to indicate what they'd be opening with. This time, though, in front of an attentive German crowd, instead of those who may be casual fans, there would be no splitting up of Tulimyrsky. Twelve and a half minutes of the first four chapters passed in what seemed like seconds. I had to listen carefully to what would happen next... and, sure enough, Mitja launched into the "sea shanty" that made up the next seven minutes - the part that went astray at Bloodstock. Would they take us all the way? Surely they wouldn't let us down? Not a hint of it. And so it came to be that Ville only announced that they were Moonsorrow, and that they were from Finland, a full thirty minutes into the set. My neck was already destroyed. My head was destroyed. I could almost not believe what I'd just witnessed. And as if to provide an extra Brucie bonus, Mitja's guitar sound had been clear enough that I'd noticed an exact mirror of the opening chord progression halfway through the sea shanty section - after some fifty-odd plays of the studio version, so if there's still anyone out there who thinks that Tulimyrsky shouldn't be considered as one huge half-hour track... there's the evidence against your erroneous beliefs. So, what could they do now? Barely was there time for a break before they romped into Raunioilla, which I'd last heard them play live on that triumphant evening at Wacken a year and a half ago, and which sounded no worse off with Janne's singing voice than with the Fat Man. They spent the rest of the set pedalling backwards through their albums, "finishing" with that favourite of the casual observer that is Pakanajuhla, and which I genuinely believe they'll drop one day to fit in something far more ambitious. And as if to reward the true fans in the crowd for our enthusiasm, they came back for a generous helping of Jotunheim. What other band could fill a 75-minute set with only six tracks and still make every single second mesmerising to the point of disbelief? I could only have been happier if they'd further cut down the number of tracks in the setlist and shoved Tuleen Ajettu Maa in there instead. Truly this band is the gift that keeps on giving.
And so, completely shattered and with only a single mouthful of any liquid of any kind since I'd left the hotel thirteen hours previously, I rewarded myself with a couple of beers. Never mind that the total cost was five euros for little more than an imperial pint, when I was that desperate for sustenance, that was the best beer I'd tasted in months. Redeeming the Pfand tokens at the cloakroom was a bit of a hassle, though, and it gave me a chance to witness a particularly ugly scene between two girls who were spiralling into a cat fight. "I don't understand German!" screeched one, in a none-too-English accent - so I have no idea where she was from, but I'd recognised her earlier as being far more friendly than this during Heidevolk's set, so maybe she was Dutch and some suppressed resentment at the Nazi occupation of Holland had boiled to the surface, as her parting line to the blonde German girl was: "You should have died in Auschwitz!" Charming. I figured I'd be better off outside where there was pizza available, and maybe I could find Ben and Gabby...
...who, it turns out, had scarpered. I was about to send them a text when I saw that they'd already sent me one, from inside McDonald's, with the time showing as "00:15". They had left just as Moonsorrow were wrapping up Raunioilla. And in fully justified retribution for this act of sheer unforgivable sacrilege, they had been chased out of said McDonald's by the local chavs, for the crime of being English. I was, of course, thoroughly unsympathetic as I met them shortly afterwards at Neumarkt. And grinned to myself at their deserved misfortune.
Still, we decided to find more late night beer, the Rampendahl having been in full flow the night before until well after midnight. Gabby had found what appeared to be a traditional Bierkeller, and took us all in its general direction, only to find on arrival that it was a hotel that was closed for the night. We were in the general vicinity of the Rampendahl, though, so we thought we'd visit again to give the weißbier a go, previous lifting of glasses notwithstanding. Unfortunately, the door had been locked from the inside, despite the presence of a healthy crowd. So we had to make do with the rather chavvy-looking dive next door, where the beer at least looked interesting. It was at this point that I realised I needed to improve my German beer jargon, as having ordered "Alt-Schluss" thinking it was a different variety of Altbier, to my horror, half the glass was filled with Coca-Cola, in a way I'd only ever seen done at Graspop. I wasn't going to waste it, so I downed it while Ben and Gabby made up their minds what to do. It tasted mainly like Coca-Cola that had gone off, with very little hint that it had ever contained any beer. Arse. The other two decided that it was best at this point to cut our losses and retreat to the hotel. Cue another five euros each for the cab - but even taking these two taxi rides into account, we were still better off financially than taking places in a hotel nearer to the city centre.
25.01.2009: A GREAT MAN'S RETURN
There was no rush to get up in the morning, so I refused to set the alarm on my phone and was woke up shortly before ten by a message from Ben. This time, the happy couple had beaten me to it and were already downstairs devouring breakfast, having completely missed out on it the day before. I managed to grab enough in the time to keep me going for a few hours, and discuss the battle plans, before returning for a much-needed shower. The downside to yesterday's late start was that there had been no time for any exploration; on a Sunday, very little, if anything, was going to be open. We did at least know where to go, though; for half of Winternoise, Ben and Gabby had disappeared to do some preliminary reconnaissance, returning only for Mael Mórdha. Seems like a waste of half the ticket price if you ask me, but still... we headed for the area around the cathedral, where - very appropriately - there was an impressive sculpture that could have been used as artwork for the next Cathedral album, involving a man in a toga, a lion that looked like it was about to cry, and an enormous scythe with bony fingers that was busy harvesting heads. Clearly this was the product of one too many Oktoberfestbiers...
We'd decided on getting a proper lunch as opposed to scraping together a Bifi Roll and a packet of Grills from the nearest petrol station, and as luck would have it, slap bang next to the cathedral was a restaurant serving a grab-it-yourself buffet lunch - some of which was served hot - for 15 euros a head. Not bad, we thought. And sure enough, there was a variety of sausages, a million different ways of serving potatoes, rice, soup, salads for the Puritan Vegetable Folk, and a spicy soup which appeared to be similar to minestrone with with blocks of what I assume to be tofu - which is as textureless and as formless as I'd always expected to be, making it obviously the food of choice for self-flagellating vegans. I had enough sausage and potato to fill me up until gone midnight, or so I thought, but still found room for a couple of rounds of dessert. The only disappointment was that the bottles of locally-produced mead they were selling for €6.50 a bottle had long since sold out... no wonder, at that price. That is a great deal, and then some.
Leaving Osnabrück some time around two in the afternoon, we had only one mission on the way back: to avoid the same trap I'd fallen into twice on the way back from Wacken, and not turn off at the wrong point of the A1/A35 in Holland. This would allow us to film the psychedelic "sharp left turn" roadsigns at the junction where we were actually supposed to turn off, which have the arrows appearing to be moving. Of course, it had to be filmed in daylight, and as there was no rain and no immediate threat of falling off the road, and it was a Sunday with very light traffic, and I was in Germany, I thought I'd floor it. I will find out one day how close the indicated 135 mph (in a diesel!) was to the real figure. So, that helped up reach the target in time, and I'm pleased to say, the mission was successful... and as soon as I have some decent video editing software, I'll post a suitably edited version.
Some may question my decision to make a deliberate wrong turning on the Antwerp ring road that would take us towards Brussels instead of Gent. I knew what I was doing, though. All the way through the French leg of my Epykkk Euro-Tour, I'd been passing a ton of Quick burger joints without ever going into one. It's a French company, but has a few branches in Belgium, and I distinctly remembered one on the motorway from Brussels to Gent, which I'd passed on the way back from Metal Camp only because I'd had lunch about an hour before. I wouldn't miss the chance this time, though, and drove like a granny as soon as I'd left the Brussels ring road so as not to miss the turning. Not that I needed to go far, as Groot-Bijgaarden was almost on the junction itself. To summarise: Quick isn't quite up there with Burger King, but knocks McDonald's into next week. Their Big Bacon is the only burger I've ever had from one of these fast food joints which is served in a brown bun with that bizarre hybrid of ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard that calls itself burger sauce. And they don;t put salt on the chips - deliberately. If I'm in this neck of the woods again, I'll be back. Although I'm not sure I needed to see the rather disturbing cartoons of inanely grinning cartoon characters picking up their burgers that were depicted on the bag. Even then, it had nothing on the truly terrifying just-let-out-of-the-asylum cartoon pizza chef on the pizza boxes that I picked up in St. Malo...
With this detour, we ended up taking it so easy that we'd arrived at Dunkirk at 10:30, with half an hour to go before the recommended check-in time, without having to kill further time in parked up in one of the towns along the A18/A16 where everything would be closed. The crossing, at midnight, was perfectly smooth, and as the British leg of the trip was as uneventful as could be expected for that time of night, held up only by the need to stop for a break just outside Banbury, there's no point mentioning that; it was six in the morning by the time we arrived back in Nottingham, but fortunately I'd had the foresight to tell the men of Attenborough Heating that I'd rather have them visit on the Tuesday for my imminent boiler replacement job rather than only two and a half hours from my return.
With a bit of luck, there will be more people for a similar event that will no doubt emerge later in the year. Paganfest will come to the UK; Heidenfest probably won't, and there's always the possibility of a better line-up for Ultima Ratio that 2008 provided.
And now for the awards!
A foaming stein of Osnabrück's finest Rampendahl Spezialbier is held up to: the people of Derby CAMRA who first alerted me to the Rampendahl; the Rampendahl itself; Ali Baba's kebab shop; the staff of Hotel Busch-Atter; filming the psychedelic roadsign; Quick turned out to be a success; Ville Sorvali; Mitja Harvilahti; Janne Perttilä; Markus Eurén; Marko Tarvonen.
A skinful of stale ram's piss is thrown at: whoever decided the bus to and from Atter should only run every hour; German chavs; the hair-flailing tosser - learn a bit of self-control, dickwad; "you should have died in Auschwitz!"; Jens Rydén's teenage antics.
I will use the style of awards from Ultima Ratio as opposed to Wacken, Bloodstock or any of the other multi-day jobs, which gives us:
Band Of The Festival: do you really need me to repeat myself?
Triumph Through Adversity: Relatively speaking, Waylander, in that they actually managed to play at all.
Surprise of the Festival: Слава Аркона!
Most Bizarre Instrument: Roibéard Ó Bogail's horn; I thought it was for drinking from.
Most Notable Absence: The Vision Bleak. Their replacements weren't up to much.
Biggest Waste Of Oxygen: The aforementioned tossbag who couldn't keep his elbows to himself and must have come close to a proper decking.
And finally, those all-important setlists:
Heidevolk: (incomplete)
De Strijdlust Is Geboren / Wodan Heerst ... Walhalla Wacht / Saksenland / Vulgaris Magistralis
Waylander: (helpfully donated by Dark Angel's Blog, which unfortunately couldn't provide the same information for Heidevolk)
King Of The Fairies / Walk With Honour / Beyond The Ninth Wave / A Hero's Lament / As The Deities Clash / Born To The Fight
Mael Mórdha: (also donated by Dark Angel's Blog)
Cluain Tarbh / Curse Of The Bard / From The Lungs Of Death (?) / Windows Of Madness / Pauper Of Souls / Gealtacht Mael Mórdha / Realms Of Insanity
Thyrfing:
The Voyager / Kaos Återkomst / En Sista Litania / Från Stormens Öga / Fat Åt Helvete / Jag Spår Fördärv / Ur Askan Ett Rike / Isolation / Digerdöden / Mjölner
Turisas:
As Torches Rise / A Portage To The Unknown / To Holmgard And Beyond / Cursed Be Iron / One More / In The Court Of Jarisleif / Miklagard Overture // Rasputin / Battle Metal
Moonsorrow:
Tulimyrsky (the full 30 minutes) / Raunioilla (parts I/II) / Aurinko Ja Kuu / Sankaritarina (8 min. edit) / Pakanajuhla // Jotunheim