As first jubilee of that day Grave Digger celebrated a very special show on True Metal Stage due to their 30 year stage jubilee. Already the opulent beginning of the show that was opened by a huge pipes&drums band gave a slight pretaste on that. As part of that gig the complete alubm "Tunes Of War" was played supported on the one hand by Van Canto that accompanied the whole concert as background choir.
Unfortunately Arch Enemy was playing parallel to Tarja on the Wacken Open Air. As I would be watching Arch Enemy later that year at Belgium on Metal Female Voices Fest VIII I preferred Tarja.
After I had seen the band in 2008 already as support act of Iron Maiden I was strongly hoping for a better show compared to the one that time. There they were completely mingled by the sound engineers and also front men Roy Khan did not have one of his best days.
In the afternoon there was some alternation to the classic metal when The Boss Hoss entered the True Metal Stage.
In the afternoon, the day continued for me with Voivod on the Party stage. Up to then I had never heard anything of the Canadians (except some songs on their homepage one week in front of their gig). And so I taled potluck on what would happen.
After the lunch break there should be a little bit more straight forward metal to be heared and so I had the band Ill Niño on my list. The nu-metal guys around frontman Christian Marchado with their Latin-American influences put you really in a good mood.
After the “Night To Remember“ the festival continued quite lively on Friday. First ones on my schedule were the guys of Amorphis. Although you had to get up quite early ;-) because the gig began at 11:45 on the True Metal Stage.
The absolute highlight of the whole festival was without doubt Iron Maiden. With their “The Final Frontier” tour the guys around frontman Bruce Dickinson guest at Wacken and presented for two hours one classic after the other, also their new song “The Final Frontier”.
The first main act of the so called “Night to Remember” entered the stage already at 17:30 in the afternoon. Alice Cooper performed his „Theatre of Death“ show.
For roughly 80 minutes the „old man“ presented great songs like „Schools out for Summer“. A really terrific show with lots of magic tricks on stage fascinated the audience, nevertheless the spark was never really ignited.
Also this year the king of home-organ may not be missing on this festival. I heard of him for the first time round about 10 years ago (to that time at the king of German late night Harald Schmidt) and so I wanted to have this cool trashy home-organ sound for the closure of this day.