Festival Reports
Graspop Metal Meeting, or GMM for short, is the first festival of the summer for many of us. As always, I was looking forward to being back at the holy grounds this year. While I was working at the festival, I checked out as many bands as possible. Let me take you along on GMM 2023!
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It’s the second day in Blackpool, and I’m taking it easy today. A leisurely breakfast at the Compass Cafe (an essential eatery when you are at Rebellion) followed by a stroll up to the Winter Gardens. After perusing the merchandise stands, it’s time to see some bands!
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Graspop Metal Meeting, or GMM for short, is the first festival of the summer for many of us. As always, I was looking forward to being back at the holy grounds this year. While I was working at the festival, I checked out as many bands as possible. Let me take you along on GMM 2023!
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If it’s August, it must be Rebellion time in Blackpool! Thousands of punters from all points on the compass have flocked to the 4-day punk rock jamboree at the Winter Gardens and are hell-bent on enjoying themselves. There are literally countless bands from all over the world playing punk, ska, goth and everything in-between, over 6 stages of varying size and also a literary stage for interviews.
The beauty of this is that there is always something on from lunchtime to the early hours of the next morning. If you don’t like the band you are watching, go and watch someone else! What is also good is that you are able to come and go as you please from the venue, so you can pop out and get refreshments rather than pay the inflated prices inside.
There is so much to see and do, and I realised last year that I wasn’t going to see everything I wanted to. The trick is to go at your own pace and enjoy yourself. There is also a large merchandise area where you can get just about anything you ever wanted, from punk rock cushion covers to that elusive record you have always wanted but could never find.
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Graspop Metal Meeting, or GMM for short, is the first festival of the summer for many of us. As always, I was looking forward to being back at the holy grounds this year. While I was working at the festival, I checked out as many bands as possible. Let me take you along on GMM 2023!
Read More >
Tuska organization killed it again, considering the line-up with a solid combination of established and classic names with modern and upcoming greats. Staying in touch with their roots and history, while at the same time looking to the future and moving forward. Tuska Sunday is always a bit of a chill-out day. Later start of the day, earlier end, less bands and more room to just hang around, stroll around to try and see if there are any things you had missed before, get those last pieces of merch or some last minute deals from the vendors that are trying to go back home with the least amount of leftover items as possible and so on. But while there were less bands to catch on this day, they were most definitely pretty massive one for one!
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Tuska organization killed it again, considering the line-up with a solid combination of established and classic names with modern and upcoming greats. Staying in touch with their roots and history, while at the same time looking to the future and moving forward. On the second day, despite a really full schedule, we took some time to go on a discovery at the newly expanded Tuska Expo which had a much better location compared to the rather stuffed space it was in last year, and with tons of really cool and interesting vendors! On top of that there were more tattoo and piercing artists present than ever before, and there were even a couple of proper suspension shows from time to time! A really cool addition to the overall festival experience that we’re hoping will continue to evolve and get more interesting. But back to the music, which is the main reason we were at Tuska. With 11 very diverse shows we managed to see, it was quite the fun day again!
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Tuska organization killed it again, considering the line-up with a solid combination of established and classic names with modern and upcoming greats. Staying in touch with their roots and history, while at the same time looking to the future and moving forward. The first day was filled with surprises and solid shows from both sides of the aisle.
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Punks not dead, but it does have a museum! Rather fortuitously, this is situated in Downtown Las Vegas, the home of the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival. This week the museum is doing very well thanks to the legions of punks flocking to it because they are in town for the festival. You can even get guided tours by punk musicians you may or may not have heard of, who will regale you with amusing anecdotes from back in the day!
At the museum you can see any number of old fliers, instruments, clothing, posters etc. from ye olden days of punk right up to more recent times, both British and American. You can even get the opportunity to play guitars donated by various punk rock luminaries through their own amps. My favourite exhibit though had to be the recreation of the garage that Pennywise used to rehearse in! Complete with its own bar and tattoo parlour the museum is well worth a look and gives you a couple of hours relief from the unrelenting Vegas sun.
This brings me to what we have all really come for – The Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival experience, and when I say experience, that is what it truly is. To fully appreciate the festival, you do have to embrace the experience as a whole. The festival is based in Downtown Las Vegas, which is hardly the sanest place on earth to begin with. To walk down Fremont Street, you experience any number of “street performers”, a vast majority of which are almost naked and doing bizarre things, a very high and noticeable homeless contingent and the just plain crazies! Add to this mixture a few thousand punk rock fans, and you have the ingredients for one mighty fine weekend!
Although the Festival runs for three days, Saturday 27th – Mon 29th May, events start to happen on the Thursday for the early arrivals. The Music Festival itself is split into three entities, the main festival itself (2 stages over 3 days), nightly club shows which take place after that day’s headliner has played and pool parties which take place each day before the main festival starts. Yes, there is a bowling competition as well.
To fit everything in, you have to be prepared to run yourself into the ground for 4 days with barely any sleep and the ingestion of copious amounts of alcohol. And even then, you probably won’t see or do everything you want to. The main festival takes place in its own dedicated grounds and has two stages which are quite close together, so there is no problem in getting from one stage to another. Everything is timed to perfection as one band finishes, another will shortly begin on the other stage. The bands are quite a mixture and shows the depth and breadth of what can be considered “punk” these days, but there is truly something for everybody. If you don’t want to watch a particular band, well just wander round the site and get something to eat and drink at the reasonably priced vendors or browse the various merchandise stores in the marketplace area.
Rather than describe every band I saw, these are my top ten moments of this year’s Punk Rock Bowling, in no particular order:
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It’s that time of the year again: The Finnish festival summer gets kicked off properly with the black metal festival Steelfest! The gathering of the wolves of the underground is easily a yearly homecoming for anyone who has a love for the extreme and obscure. And as always, the lineup is massive with an impressive list of 46 bands filled with cult bands, legends of the underground scene, and exclusive and rare performances.
After last year’s extended anniversary edition, they decided to permanently add an extra day to what used to be a 2-day celebration of the underground. After a first day of great shows, we got back to the festival ground early to catch as many bands as we could. Sadly we missed out on Rienaus, Gaurithoth and Ritualization because we simply couldn’t get there that early, but luckily there was more than enough to fulfill our need for extreme and underground music…
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