It was cool to read your story Martijn, and so nice to meet you and the others
I'm beginning to recover from a weekend without shower, without healthy food, without much sleep and WITHOUT GOD yeeeaaahhh!!!
Musically, it was certainly one of the best festivals ever and I don't regret driving the 2x 1500 km, it was all worth it!
My favourite concerts were:
Of course Katatonia playing the completely unexpected Without God, it made me soooooo happy. When Jonas announced a couple of old songs I thought ok- Murder, but what's the rest of the couple?! And then I could hardly believe it....
they played only the first half of the song but I'm not complaing, it was wonderful, thank you so much!!! And sure, hearing Consternation again was brilliant as well
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The other big surprise was My Dying Bride- the violin is back!!!!! At least for the next couple of gigs. So they played some more of the old violin stuff like Here In The Throat and From Darkest Skies, which they hadn't done for ages, oh, I really loved it!
I'm too lazy now to comment every single band but those deserve to be mentioned:
At The Gates (insane!!), Anathema (I love their passion, great setlist), Ghost Brigade (best band of those I saw for the first time on this festival), Primordial (very intense, impressive response from the crowd), Cult of Luna (amazing lightshow/ atmosphere), Iced Earth (I'm so glad Barlow is back, even without his beautiful hair), Opeth (I'm sorry for not headbanging but I had somehow managed to sort of wash my hair before their gig and I wanted to keep the fresh feeling as long as possible), Porcupine Tree (relaxing among all the metal), Year Of No Light (another interesting band I didn't know before), basically enjoyed Candlemass too, still have to get used to the new singer though.
Ok, what else? The weather was a bit too warm but it could have been far worse. The complete lack of showers was a challenge. On Saturday, me and a friend walked through the town and saw a lady watering her flowers and so we asked her to give us a little shower too. Like almost everyone, she didn't speak English but somehow understood what we wanted, so we just threw off our shoes and shirts and had great refreshing fun in her garden. The food sucked
Bread with french fries and icecream... being a vegetarian isn't easy sometimes... I'm glad there was not much time for eating anyway. Instead, I got drunk. The festival area was really nice, most of the staff were friendly, although the communication was a bit difficult.
I met Camille, Juniper and Martijn from the forum, other non- forum friends, various new people and last but not least, I got to hang out, chat and party with both of my favourite bands- Katatonia and My Dying Bride... sweeeeet...