Faster, harder, louder - even before the official start, the boxes on the smaller stages of the heavy metal festival in Wacken should be really cranked up. The Wacken Open Air actually starts on Thursday.
According to the organizers, the festival is sold out with 75,000 visitors. Metal fans have been traveling north for days. "The journey is going well and more than 50 percent of the space will probably be occupied by the evening," said festival co-organizer Thomas Jensen of the German Press Agency.
According to the police, a lot of arrival traffic is expected on Wednesday. Black T-shirts and cowls already dominated the scene in town on Tuesday. "Finally normal people again," said festival visitor Nina Still.
Big names from the heavy metal scene like Judas Priest want to play in the north until Saturday. A total of 200 bands are expected. Also present are Slipknot, Powerwolf, Hämatom, In Extremo, Lordi, Slime, Venom and for the first time the Cologne band Höhner. The anticipation for the Wacken Open Air is great. At the so-called Wacken-Wednesday, Avantasia and Epica, among others, get down to business on the third-largest stage. Separate tickets were sold to festival-goers for this stage. In 2023, Wednesday will then become the official festival day.
In 1990, 800 heavy metal fans celebrated for the first time in the small northern town. After that, the festival got bigger and bigger, most recently 75,000 fans came regularly. More than 95 percent of the fans had exchanged their tickets for the festival, which was canceled again last year due to the corona pandemic. The rest of the tickets were raffled off via a waiting list.
