Here is the reviews of Wacken Open Air 2008, the biggest Metal festival in the world. It was my third visit to the Festival and the impressions I had in the other two festivals stayed. WOA is still an experience that every metalhead should experience at least once in their life !

So Day 1 (Thursday 30th of July) my brother and I arrived at the show, we passed by the Press point to get our passes and I admit the organization there was pretty good and it didn't take long until we step foot into Wacken holy land :). First thing that standed up from the last shows we had seen where the three giant screens on top in between and sides of the Black Metal & True Metal Stage. There wasn't much to be seen this first day (beside the main attraction that is), but we caught three shows, Lauren Harris, Airbourne & the mighty Iron Maiden !

Lauren Harris show was nice if you like Pop / Rock songs in general. There were some nice songs and she had a rather good presence on stage and the 45 minutes passed rather quickly. It was definitely not a defining moment of the festival but it was interesting seeing Iron Maiden's Harris bass guitar player's daughter. Overall the music seemed a little out of context (too Pop-ish for a metal festival like Wacken)

A bit later Airbourne came on stage, and I must say it was a huge surprise to me. The energy on stage, the powerful riffs and excellent hooks as well as the over-the-top, a la AC/DC rock attitude made this show a festival's highlight ! The energy of the band was palpable and made us want to headbang all along. particular thrilling moment was when the singer/guitar player climbed up a stage pillar in the middle of a song up to 20-30 meters and hanging by his legs started playing a guitar solo ! What an energy and what a moment !

But the biggest thing was yet to come that night, at 21h30, Iron Maiden came on stage to enflame the public of Wacken, which must have been at around 60'000+ people and for someone not very at ease in a big crowd, I must admit that it was about 50'000+ too many people for my taste :), but of course that's just me. I don't really like being pushed around, kicked in the head from crowd diving people's boots and having people sweat all over me. Fortunately Iron Maiden playing mostly the classics with such energy and majesty quickly made me forget about these annoying personal issues with crowds in general. The tracklist was allmighty (except maybe for two songs that might have been replaced by others, those where Revelations and Heaven Can Wait) :

Intro
Aces High
2 Minutes to Midnight
Revelations
The Trooper
Wasted Years
The Number of the Beast
Run to the Hills
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Powerslave
Heaven Can Wait
Can I Play With Madness
Fear Of The Dark
Iron Maiden

Then after the callback,

Moonchild
The Clairvoyant
Hallowed Be Thy Name

The show was simply awesome, I hadn't seen Iron Maiden in years, since the Brave New World tour and I must say I really loved and enjoyed the show deeply, the public was frenetic (too much to my taste as I explained before but that's probably just me :) ) and the ambience was quite mindblowing, I could turn my heads all directions and all I would see is people. The sound was so powerful, blasting from every speakers of the festival (or at least from both main stages). Bruce also went crazy about a pole camera, arguing that either it had to go or he would... he seemed really pissed about it and it was kinda funny.

Overall it was a good day even though we didn't have much to see beside Airbourne and the mighty Iron Maiden, but both performances was so great that it actually didn't matter how slim the day was in terms of numbers of shows.