How to Survive a Metal Festival: A Totally Serious Guide for Total Beginners
1. Choose your tent like your favorite underpants: robust, durable and easy to repair
If your tent looks like a wet teabag after a moshpit, it's not going to save you. And to survive a festival as a tentless free-range metalhead, you need good connections in the field. Unless you're a young, attractive woman. In that case, you basically have the choice of tent. So invest in something that can withstand wind, rain and drunks. Pro tip: Don't take a white tent. It will be the color of Slayer-Blood Red on the second day – with aromas of beer and burnt barbecue sausage.
2. Beer is not a meal, it's a religion
At festivals, beer replaces the staple food group "water". Drink it cold, warm or from a crooked watering can – as long as you drink it irresponsibly. But remember: after ten cans of Pilsner, you don't have a beard, you are the beard.
3. The toilet war: Welcome to hell
Porta-potties are not sanitary facilities. They are tests of your inner strength. Take toilet paper with you. No, more. No, even more. Be mentally prepared to leave your own soul behind when you enter one. Hell has fire. Festival toilets have odor dimensions. Multidimensional.
4. Dress in black, but functionally
Black is mandatory. It stands for rebellion, darkness, and the ability to conceal mustard and mud stains. But don't be a hero: boots or wellies are your best friend. Nobody looks cool in knee-high mud – unless you want to be in the "Lost and Found" section of the festival Facebook page.
5. Learn to identify bands by volume and beard length
You often won't know who's playing. Never mind. Rule of thumb:
- Little beard, lots of grunting = Deathcore
- Long beard, guitar solos, Viking flags = clear, Viking Metal
- No beard, just fog and unintelligible nagging = Black Metal
- No beard, instead brave warriors in shining armor = Power Metal
- Leather, rivets, beard mainly on the head = TrVe Metal
- Well-trimmed beards and fashionable hairstyles everywhere = Welcome, you've landed at the wrong festival.
6. Sleep is for the weak. Or the clever ones.
You have two options:
- Keep going until you talk to the tent. Or the tent with you.
- Earplugs, sleep mask and a heart of steel.
You'll wake up in your camping chair at some point anyway – with sunburn, a half-full beer in your lap and a strange sock on your face. That would be a pretty average experience for a Metal festival.
7. Mosh pits: sporting activity or close combat simulation?
When the pit opens, decide quickly:
- Join in – you'll need sturdy shoes and medical insurance.
- Dodge it – preferably to the chip shop.
- Or the legendary "Wall of Nope": simply slide backwards into the crowd as if you had never been there.
8. Showers? Only for philistines. Or legends.
Showering at festivals is like sleeping in a hotel in the next town: theoretically possible, but frowned upon and therefore probably rarely seen. Alternatives:
- Wet wipes (unused!)
- Deodorant (one can is enough)
- Smoke from the barbecue as a natural disinfectant
- A puddle of rain (only if it has rained, otherwise it's probably not water)
Or you give up and become part of the olfactory scenery – an olfactory work of art.
9. Enjoy the moment, and post later
You're not here to post 1,000 stories. You're here for headbanging, beer showers, sunsets over tent castles and the feeling of 50,000 people roaring along to your favorite bands. It's not an event, it's a ritual.
Conclusion: You won't be the same person.
You'll be burnt, muddy, hungover and probably in love with someone in an elf costume. But you will survive. And next year you'll say again: "I should really take a tent with me this year."