SHARE
COPY LINK

MUSIC

Got festival fever? Here are Germany’s best picks

Whether you're an indie kid, a pop lover or a metalhead, there's a festival for you in Germany this summer.

Got festival fever? Here are Germany's best picks
Wacken Open Air festival in Schleswig-Holstein. Photo: DPA

Wacken Open Air (August 4th-6th)

Wacken, Schleswig-Holstein

Front-row fans at Wacken Open Air 2015. Photo: DPA

This hard rock and metal festival is a European must. This year Wacken Open Air will be attracting hardcore Scandinavian metal bands such as Arch Enemy and Marduk as well as huge international hard rock and metal names like Foreigner, Iron Maiden, Blue Öyster Cult and Whitesnake.

International heavy metal magazine Metal Blast called Wacken “the most important metal festival in the world”. If you arrive a day early, the stages will already be full of battle of the bands tournaments featuring upcoming metal bands from all over the world.

Tickets to the festival are sold out, but if you're a metalhead, it's imperative you go. You'll be sure to find some tickets floating around online.

Melt! Festival (July 15th-17th)

Ferropolis, Saxony-Anhalt

Around 20,000 people at Melt! Festival 2013. Photo: DPA

Looking for something more mainstream, but still not quite pop, and also a bit edgy? Melt is perfect, featuring a line-up mainly of indie rock artists with a few rogue choices here and there. If you decide to pay the festival a visit this year, you'll be treated to performances by M83, Skepta, Tame Impala, Jamie xx, Two Door Cinema Club and Chvrches.

Melt's clinch is its entirely unique location. Around two hours south of Berlin, the festival takes place on a small peninsula called Ferropolis (city of steel), surrounded by a beautiful lake. The peninsula itself is littered with old machinery up to 30 metres in height, as the area used to be a mining site and is now an open-air industrial machine museum for the rest of the year.

If you think a whole weekend would be too much of a good thing, you have the option to buy a ticket for a single day out of the three. 

Tollwood Summerfestival  (June 26th-July 24th)

Munich Olympiapark, Bavaria

Giraffes carved out of wood at Tollwood Summerfestival. Photo: DPA

Tollwood is less of a strictly-organised weekend festival and more of a four-week extravaganza, attracting on average 1.5 million visitors. Individual concerts from one artist will take place on a certain night, and you pay to see whichever you want. Upcoming performances include Beirut on July 10th, Anastacia on the 11th, Deep Purple on the 19th and Rea Garvey on the 24th.

The festival is not just music-based. There will also be comedy and cabaret going on around the festival area, and three quarters of all acts at Tollwood are free to see.

Lollapalooza Berlin (September 10th-11th)

Treptower Park, Berlin

Lollapalooza Festival 2015. Photo: DPA

This two-day festival is a branch of the American Lollapalooza held in Chicago's Grant Park, and is the first in Europe. Despite only being in its second year, Melvin Benn, one of the festival's promoters, claimed: “I don’t know if there’s a more visually attractive festival in Germany.”

This year's line-up is full of worldwide rock and dance sensations such as Radiohead, Kings of Leon, New Order, Major Lazer and the Kaiser Chiefs.

There is a special area called Der Grüne Kiez, where you can take a break from the music and enjoy some calm time with a glass of wine in the gardens with some vegan or vegetarian food. There will also be art installations made from recycled materials along with workshops and street theatre.

A Summer's Tale (August 10th-13th)

Eventpark Luhmühlen, Lower Saxony

Sick of hustle and bustle? Want to tone it down? This relaxed festival might be right up your street. This year the weekend incorporates acts like Sigur Rós, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds and Garbage.

But A Summer's Tale is more of an all-rounder than a festival specifically geared towards music. There are a monumental number of workshops on offer, and you can spend the weekend learning yoga, finger knitting, or practising slam poetry. If you explore the park, you might also find movies on show, art performances and authors giving readings of their books.

Chiemsee Summer (August 24th-27th)

Chiemsee, Bavaria

A sailboat on Bavaria's Chiemsee. Photo: DPA

This four-day festival at one of Bavaria's most popular holiday spots, the Chiemsee, is an unusual mix of fresh, lively music. The line-up consists of rock, electro and reggae artists including Limp Bizkit, Sum 41, The Prodigy, Steve Aoki and Damian Marley.

The Chiemsee is the biggest lake in Bavaria, and you can go for a swim to freshen up in the morning after a big night of partying. You can also hire a kayak or a boat and explore the waters with the mellifluous sound of The Prodigy giving you a peaceful soundtrack.

By Ali Butt

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

SHOW COMMENTS