Thursday, 17th June 2010. Everybody was sleeping at home and taking advantage of a well deserved rest. But not us. We had an appointment at the railway station of Lausanne at thirteen o’clock and then took the train to Jonschwil, a little village (3000 inhabitants) in the canton of St-Gall. Here took place the Sonisphere Festival, a very important metal festival, which takes place in many places in Europe every summer. The “Jonschwil edition” took place on a field; 70’000 metal fans replaced a few dozens of cows during two days.
(Jonschwil on Google Maps: http://maps.google.ch/maps?hl=fr&q=jonschwil&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Jonschwil,+Wil,+Saint-Gall&gl=ch&ei=6CHETJK7A4GXOoHM8f0L&ved=0CBoQ8gEwAA&z=13)
24 bands were scheduled on two days:
- 6 on Thursday for a “Warm Up Party” (The Sorrow, Job For A Cowboy, 36 Crazy Fists, Unearth, Over Kill, Airbourne)
- 18 on Friday on two stages (Smoke Blow, Devil Driver, Hell Yeah, Atreyu, As I Lay Dying, Anthrax, Bullet For My Valentine, Alice in Chains, Stone Sour, Slayer, Megadeth, Motörhead, Rise Against, Metallica, Volbeat, Amon Amarth, 3 Inches of Blood, Dear Superstar)
It was the first time in history that the “Big Four of Trash”, the four most important trash metal bands (Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer and Metallica) played in the same day on the same stage.
Already in the train, we met many other metal fans who we were ready to pass three mad days. We ate potato chips, drank beer and sang metal songs during the whole journey. Some people in the train were a bit scared by seeing all these young fans dressed in black. Finally, after a 4 hours-trip and after walking for a quarter of an hour, we arrived! The “Devil’s field”, where we would see many of the biggest metal bands of all times!
Just when we arrived at the ticket check, the rain began to fall. And, of course, the nice green meadow started to turn into mud… It quickly became a real mess. We installed our tent and then walked in the direction of the stages.
From the end of the afternoon, the first bands started to play. At one hour in the morning, the Warm Up Party was finished. All the metal fans went under the tents where there was…metal disco! And many metal fans, dressed like cow-boys, Angus Young, Devil or anything funny, sang and danced on AC/DC, Metallica, and others big groups. It was really funny and friendly. Everybody spoke with everybody, drank beer, spoke again, and drank again and again. At 4 o’clock AM, we went to our tent and tried to sleep with our wet, cold and disgusting clothes. We slept five hours.
At 9 o’clock, we got up and went back to the stages. We stayed there all day listening to the bands, drinking some beer, eating sausages and buying a few T-Shirts. It did not stop raining between Thursday afternoon and Friday afternoon.
At last, around 6:00 PM the rain stopped falling, and, before the Motörhead show, we moved to find a good place near the main stage for their show, and also for the Metallica show, for which we had been waiting for several weeks. So, after the Motörhead concert, which was absolutely great, we waited another hour with the band Rise Against.
Finally, at 9:00 PM we could hear the song “The Ecstasy of Gold” from the film “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, which is used as an introduction to every concert of Metallica. And the band (Lars Ulrich – drums, Kirk Hammett – lead guitar, Robert Trujillo – bass and James Hetfield – rhythm guitar + vocals) appeared on the stage. Then followed 2 hours of pure awesomeness. They played a lot of their old hits, like Fade To Black, Master Of Puppets, Enter Sandman and many others and some songs from their last album, Death Magnetic. Although our feet were stuck in 15 centimeters of mud, the atmosphere was more than great.
(The song starts at 1:00)
After these two epic hours, we stayed to listen to the last bands of the festival, especially Amon Amarth (Sweden) and 3 Inches Of Blood (Canada). During these last two concerts, we burnt the last drops of our energy before going back to the metal bar for the last time. At 4 o’clock we walked to our tent and decided to sleep a bit, but we couldn’t sleep in the tent because we were too muddy. So we tried to sleep on a military tarpaulin placed on the ground, but the rain began to fall again. In consequence, after checking the trains’ timetable, we dissembled the tent and took the first train to Lausanne at 6:00 AM.
The return trip was quite an adventure too, as we didn’t want to dirty the coaches. Consequently, we had to stay in the little space at the extremity of a coach for the whole trip. And when we had to change trains in Biel, it was quite hard to run on the platforms while carrying our bags, the tent and the big (25 m2) tarpaulin... But we finally got back home and slept to recover from these two crazy days.
The field before the festival |
The field during the festival, with the two stages |
The camping after the festival, on saturday morning |
Robin & Jules
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