KEY POINTS:
It is the legions of black T-shirts and the smell of fresh urine that let us know we are close to the Holy Land.
The "Holy Land" of the Wacken Open Air music festival, that is. Also known as the biggest open-air heavy metal festival in the world. I kid you not. There are people wearing T-shirts in front of us right now, as we walk toward the festival site, proclaiming that this rock festival is a holy one. Some of them are urinating on the side of the street. This will become a common theme.
The Wacken Open Air has been an annual event for almost 20 years now; it started with an audience of around 2000 which, over time, has grown to a whopping 75,000 or so attendees.
But for many of the self-proclaimed headbangers coming here, Wacken is much more than a music festival. Almost everyone you talk to drops the word "pilgrimage" into the conversation sooner or later. Research Wacken online and you'll find such over-the-top sentiments as: "the playground of the heavy metal gods", "a unique, intense and incredible experience, it's your holy headbanger's pilgrimage".
Catching the shuttle bus here - every good pilgrimage starts with a journey and Wacken isn't easy to get to, even if, like me, you live in Germany - we've already witnessed the first evidence of true devotion.
Heavy metal pilgrims had come from far and wide to be here - there were Russians, Mexicans, Spanish and British in the eight-seater van and they hummed along when Iron Maiden's Run to the Hills came on the radio.
The girl sitting next to me was wearing several Wacken wristbands. These are the cloth bands that you get upon entry; she already had three and was going to claim a fourth. At first I thought she must have saved them and put them on again in time for this year's festival. But no, she's been wearing them non-stop for three years, a mark of the truly dedicated Wacken pilgrim. My naked wrists did not feel hard-core.
But calling a heavy metal festival holy, turning a mere rock concert into an annual pilgrimage, saving all your pay to come here, buying tickets a year in advance, travelling from across the globe, wearing dirty cloth bands for three years? Well, surely that's going just a bit too far? What could be causing such slavish devotion?
Maybe it's the location. After all some festivals, especially of the hippie sort, take place in mystical craters where aliens apparently once landed (The Gathering) or where druids held ceremonies (Glastonbury) and apparently this gives them a special frisson.
Blessed-by-Iron-Maiden the small town of Wacken might be - but it doesn't look like much. It looks more like a better appointed, far-flung suburb of Palmerston North - one that's shockingly quiet.
We arrive at the festival grounds themselves and while it's properly noisy, looking around the campground, there isn't much of a sense of spiritual rejuvenation here either - something commonly associated with pilgrimage.
If anyone's being rejuvenated, it's due to falling into a wasted, alcoholic slumber. And as we take our first stroll through the campground we almost trip over a victim of Wacken-style spiritual rejuvenation. We'll find a lot more of these too: every morning there's a new victim of spiritual rejuvenation blocking the path to the loos - one morning, the guy's clutching a beer bottle to his chest like a teddy, the next another guy's clutching a phone as though he tried to call for help shortly before keeling over. If anything is of biblical proportions here, it is the campground. If you can make your way onto one of the small hillocks on this farm, you will see heavy metallers' tents spread out all around you like that of some vast conquering army.
In the breeze, various decorations flutter and twist - these range from your average national flag to inflatable sex dolls skewered on broomsticks to real horned skulls mounted on poles and lit with green spotlights.
The metallers are not environmentally conscious: piles of rubbish float across the paths and between the tents like tangled clumps of seaweed on the ocean after a storm.
Campground action consists mainly of people sitting around drinking beer and playing heavy metal music loud enough to drown out the heavy metal music their neighbours are playing.
Yes, as we will discover soon enough, every day the damp peace of the early morning campground - all snoring drunks and long, wet grass - is disturbed by the cock-a-doodle-do of some wheeling guitar riff. Heavy metallers get up and comb their hair (there's a lot of grooming involved with all that hair) to the sunrise sounds of Black Sabbath or similar. And every night I go to sleep, earplugs firmly jammed in, vibrating to the dull thuds of bass guitar.
The festival grounds themselves are equally enormous. You need to walk for at least 15 to 20 minutes to get from the camping area to the action. It would take about an hour to circumnavigate the lot, possibly more.
Everything is impressively huge: the beer garden, the rows and rows of fast-food stalls offering everything from Asian stir-fry to kebabs and chips, the giant spotlights that whip the night sky in time to the music and the Metal Market where you can find all the corsets, camouflage pants and heavy metal music you want, but where you will never, ever find a plain black T-shirt. At the Wacken merchandise stalls you can buy everything from a baby bib to a tent to a vibrator, all of them bearing the horned Wacken logo.
And then there are the three huge, technically perfect stages that crown the field, complete with giant video screens, over which the various performers rotate.
On the Thursday night we arrived in the dark, but just in time to see Iron Maiden play. The scale of their props is impressive. The huge skeletal monster known as Eddie, direct from their album covers, lunging over lead singer Bruce Dickinson, is almost as mind boggling as Dickinson's scaled, sparkly pants.
The sheer range of heavy metal music to sample is also impressive. There's everything here from pirate metal (where the band dress like pirates and play an accordion) to a cappella metal (five singers accompanied by a drummer) to an AC/DC covers band to a group called Corvus Corax that make medieval-style heavy metal and appear on stage together with dozens of hooded figures.
Speaking of which, the true pilgrim must check out the Medieval Market. This is a special area reserved for the sale and demonstration of goods with a Middle Ages or gothic-metal theme, and they do a roaring trade in wooden axes, chain mail, horned hats and witchy-poo pendants, as well as the very popular, hollowed-out horns which have crossed the metal divide and are sold in the main market as beer-drinking vessels.
"Some of them are into Middle Ages role playing, others just think 'that's going to look good on my wall at home'," says the genial Fabian of his customers. He wears a long red robe and lives in a sort of a Robin-Hood-style teepee inside the Medieval Market. "Actually," Fabian muses, "I think it can have quite a lot to do with how much beer they have had to drink."
And although this festival may look like one of the most conformist you have ever seen - wear a coloured T-shirt and you immediately feel out of place - there are actually big differences between the followers of different genres of heavy metal.
"The more indecipherable the band's logo is, the more extreme - and usually Satanic - they are," one of our young British informants tells us. "For instance, that guy over there is pretty extreme," he says, pointing out one denim vest covered in random squiggles that are actually band names no one else can read. Well, it would be scary if you didn't suddenly get a vision of said guy at home studiously sewing his satanic patches on to his vest by the fire.
It cannot simply be the XL size of everything that makes Wacken nirvana for headbangers. After all, other music festivals are just as big. So let's ask the headbangers.
"It's a family thing," explains Travis Court, a butcher from Sydney. He's been a metal devotee since he was 10 years old, he's known about Wacken for a decade and he proclaims, with no irony whatsoever, that this is "our Graceland".
"Everyone's family here," Court repeats. "Like this morning I woke up and had a drink with the Estonians next door [to our tent]. They're complete strangers, they don't speak English, we don't understand each other at all - but we do, if you know what I mean."
"And after three days, you've got 70,000 brothers and sisters," interrupts one of Court's travelling companions, Harmony Black, an excitable Australian babe in her early 20s and wearing a sparkly blue bikini, who's travelled directly from Sydney. Other festival goers say pretty much the same thing. So do the bands.
"Yeah, it's definitely a pilgrimage for the bands too," says Mat Maurer, lead singer of long-serving Australian metal band, Mortal Sin. No New Zealand bands have ever played at Wacken but the Australians have a fairly long association with the festival. "I mean, when we first started playing today, there was a huge crowd - you could see them miles back. You don't really get to play that kind of crowd unless you play Big Day Out," he says. "It's an international event. We've met people from Mexico, from Brazil, from Sweden. But it really doesn't matter where you come from, we are all one big family."
Peace, good vibes and a loving atmosphere - and they all really mean it.
And for me, this is one of the weirdest things about the festival. Quite a few of the people here look like you might not want to meet them in a darkened alley - they're big, burly, tattooed, all dressed in black. Everyone, bar almost none, wears black T-shirts here. Most offer band names but a lot also bear messages that you wouldn't want someone to send you in an anonymous note. Here's a quick sample: "Everyone Dies"; "The darkness is my only friend"; "Beware for the storm cometh"; "Raise the flag of hate".
But hang on a moment. There doesn't seem to be anyone actually raising the flag of hate, befriending darkness or opening the gates of hell or whatever else their T-shirts might suggest.
"We don't see it like you do," Court says. "It's just part of the imagery. I have T-shirts with 666 on them but I'm a total atheist. We don't take that stuff seriously, we take the music seriously. It's sort of a private joke. It may look extreme but really we're just everyday people who like a certain sort of music."
So it's all right to mention Spinal Tap, the best heavy metal mockumentary in the world, then?
Apparently so. "People just can't take it that seriously," argues Lucy from Sussex, who's here with a bunch of friends from England, all in their early 20s. "I mean with bands like Immortal [a Norwegian black metal band], who would take them seriously? Apart from them, of course. We're all just gentle nerds with long hair, really," she laughs.
"There's definitely a misconception."
Over the next few days, I come to believe that both Lucy and Court have a point. Almost everyone is friendly, mostly unfailingly polite and, if neither of those, then minding their own drunken business.
"Sometimes there can be territorial aggression," says Lucy's friend, Hannah, a pretty, dark-haired Briton. She's sitting on a box in the campsite she's sharing with six other British fans. They've come prepared with a canopy to sit under, beer and tins of ravioli.
"But really, the music is an outlet for any aggression," Lucy says.
Indeed, it seems that the worst violence occurs in the mosh pit. "People come out of there with blood running down their faces," says William, another of the British friends. "But generally they come out and they're smiling, they're often a bit pissed and they'll just be going, 'well, that was just great!"'
Yet I am also told that if you fall over in the mosh pit, someone will pick you up so you don't get trampled.
Later on, the German police and the local equivalent of St John's Ambulance verify this glaring lack of aggression. They've had around 4000 reported injuries and incidents, with 260 ending up in hospital, but this has been mainly due to injuries to feet, wasp stings and too much booze. If anyone is particularly naughty they are simply sent packing, rather than arrested.
"Actually one of the most common complaints we have had is from people who come and tell us, "there's a drunk person in my tent, I don't know them and I can't wake them," says Major Jurgen Herdes, who's in charge of the Wacken police presence. "So we have to go and pull them out of the tent and let them sleep it off on the grass outside."
"I'm a musician too and I go to many festivals," says Jens Stamnitz, the spokesman for the first-aiders here for the long weekend. "And this is most peaceful one. Last week we were at Rock Am Ring [another festival in West Germany] and although there were not more people, there were three times as many injuries. I think it's because the people that come here all have the same interests. After all, if you were into heavy metal or punk and you were camping next to a whole bunch of hip-hop fans that kept playing 50 Cent, you're bound to get tension."
"It's also the German attitude," notes another British camper. "It's live and let live."
Quite possibly. During a press conference the organisers themselves are confronted by a journalist who asks about the bloodied heads of lambs that were used in a performance by a band called Gorgoroth. And they reply that, "we think that as long as nobody gets hurt, that the freedoms of the individual are not harmed and that it's not fascist or racist, then the art should stay with the artist".
"And you have to remember you are among people who see this as art," adds Holger Huebner, one of the founders of the Wacken festival and a native of the nearby town of Itzehoe.
But perhaps the last word is best left with Travis Court, the big Australian butcher with Slayer and Metallica tattoos. Because, while I understand the joy and security in spending quality time with members of your own sub-cultural tribe, I am still not sure I will ever be able to wear a T-shirt that says "Die F***** Die" without actually meaning it. But the way Court declared his love of heavy metal was truly moving, tugging at the heart strings of anyone who's ever felt left out of anything.
"When I started high school, everything became this big popularity contest," he recalls. "You try to fit in. And then you realise that 'I am not going to fit in'. And you don't want to fit in. And then you find other people with the same interests as you. So we started a band. Now I work in a [supermarket] and I am the only one in the store that listens to heavy metal. Basically people think you're a scumbag if you listen to this kind of music," he laughs.
"I'm 29. Back home my girlfriend is pregnant and I'm moving on to what I think is the next stage in my life - I'm growing up. I bought an Iron Maiden bib and an AC/DC jumpsuit! So I guess this is a little bit like my last hurrah. The feeling I got, when I got here on Wednesday - I felt like I was home, I had arrived. I was meant to be here with all of these people. And I just don't want to leave, I love this place."
