Metalway Festival
Gernika, Spain, 12th-14th August 2005
At the heart of the Basque country lies Gernika, the spiritual centre of Basque nationalism and birthplace of Basque autonomy, inspiration for one of Picasso's most famous works and home of the Metalway Festival.
If you're not into metal, you are not my friend
In Spain, heavy metal is not an underground movement, it's the music of the mainstream. Poodle hair, spandex and tigerskin trousers, drainpipe denims, enormous white trainers and bullet belts are still very much de rigeur in España, the land where the mullet still rules. And in Spain, bands such as Blind Guardian, Hammerfall and the mighty Manowar are greeted not with derision or denial, but lauded as all-conquering heroes. So if Ian wants to see Manowar, to Spain we must go.
Nessun dorma
An event like the Metalway Festival would never be allowed to take place in the UK. Held at the Santa Lucia football ground (not at all a stadium of Old Trafford proportions but a field with a few rows of benches, more suited to Macclesfield FC than Man U), the festival takes over the entire town. The music blasts away until three o'clock in the morning and the general carousing carries on until, well, the next morning really, whilst the picturesque streets are strewn with fliers, bottles, cans and other rubbish.
Despairing of finding a pitch in the hugely overcrowded, chokingly dusty and uncomfortably stony wasteland that doubles as a campsite, latecomers erect their tents in the gardens of the flats and houses which surround the festival ground. Little old ladies share park benches with hardcore metalheads and barely dressed rock chicks whilst every available inch of road and pavement is taken up with badly parked vans and cars, packed with bottles of water and cans of beer, rear windows emblazoned with the names of scary sounding bands in über-gothic fonts.
Heavy metal, or no metal at all
But enough of the build up, what of the bands? Well, we miss the first two (Sonata Arctica and Tierra Santa, whoever they may be – the former boast a suitably numinous looking fantasy T-shirt and the latter are probably Spanish) because we're still struggling to erect our tent across a ditch and a ridge of stones as uncompromising as a dinosaur's spine, but we catch Basque heroes Soziedad Alkoholika, who sound pretty good in an old school Metallica kind of way, even if we can't understand a word they say.
I have no recollection at all of Sentenced, but Ian reliably informs me that they were the band who were pish. Obituary are heads between knees, hair flailing, growling grunting thrash and just so not my Nightmare Before Christmas bag, which just leaves the mighty Motörhead – unfortunately plagued by a series of pesky technical problems which render them not so mighty after all. A workmanlike but somewhat lacklustre set doesn't exactly set the crowd alight, but they play 'Killed By Death' so I'm fairly happy. And then we have Korn, but by now it's almost one o'clock in the morning and we're heading for our lumpy bed.
The gods made heavy metal
Saturday is the main event: Saturday is Manowar day. But first we have to get through: Sodom (missed 'em); Primal Fear (a cross between Judas Priest and Right Said Fred, but catchy(ish) toons and the expert showmanship of their slapheided frontman, clad in a flared jumpsuit more suited to Giant Haystacks or a WWF wrestler than a heavy metal rockstar, makes their set really quite entertaining, and they certainly handle the technical failure better than Motörhead did); Su Ta Gar (more Basque rock, but not as cool as Soziedad Alkoholika), Saxon and Children of Bodom.
Saxon are, surprisingly, great fun: no-nonsense, ballsy British rock that hits the spot perfectly as we soak up the sun and beer in equal measures. Clad in a long sweeping coat, grey hair flying, there's more than a touch of the Strange Fruits about Biff Byford, but he can still belt 'em out like a true heavy metal trooper, and what more can we ask?
I had high (well, sort of high) hopes of Children of Bodom, being, as they are Finnish (but then so are the Rasmus) but their strange mishmash of Slayer, Blind Guardian and the Murderdolls sadly just doesn't work. Plus there's a limit to how many effing this and effing thats you really need from to hear from a frontman.
By now it's almost midnight, and we've another band to go before Manowar, German hardcore heroes Kreator. We sit on a bench and drink local cider. Not much longer to go…
High and mighty alone we are kings
In the end, Manowar, the self-anointed kings of metal, do exactly what they say on the tin. We knew the intro was going to be gloriously overblown and ludicrously pompous. It was. We knew that Manowar bassist and kingpin Joey DeMaio would preen and pose like a stallion whilst vocalist Eric Adams would scream himself hoarse and yet hit every note of pure metal perfectly. Believe me, they did.
Manowar are the epitome of everything that is ridiculous and derisory about heavy metal: the vainglorious lyrics, endlessly recycled over 20 years' worth of albums; the overblown guitar and (eek!) bass solos; the dodgy allusions to Anglo Saxon and Norse mythology (when men were men and women were… well, absent, apparently – Manowar are the only rock band on the planet to claim they have 'one thing on their minds' and mean metal); the endless insistence on fighting a world that wants to oppress them (or, more likely, just snigger a lot).
And yet, when you see them live, you can't help but be entertained. They are the essence of absurd, testosterone-fuelled metal excess, and from the somewhat predictable opener 'Kings of Metal' through singalong power ballad 'Heart of Steel' (about fighting of course, not soppy luurve or anything) to the triumphant closing track 'Black Wind Fire and Steel', they have the audience eating out of the sweaty palms of their sword hands.
A shame there's rather too much silly posturing and endless endings and not really enough songs (cut out the widdling and they could have played 'Battle Hymns', 'Sword Into The Wind' and 'Metal Warriors') but they play until three in the morning, so I guess we can't complain. A triumph of steel indeed.
Metal daze
Sunday brings another day of hardcore heroes and, um, other bands we've never heard of, but even the lure of cello thrashers Apocalyptica and (gads) WASP can't persuade us to spend another night in that campsite. Sticky, sweaty, and caked with dust, we decide it's time to return to Sopelana. Wimps and posers, leave the hall…
Motörhead + Sepultura, 9th November 2004
96.3 Rock Radio 2nd Birthday Bash, 8th January 2009
Sweden Rock 2008, 5th-8th June 2008
Saxon, 19th May 2007
