Happy Birthday to one of the biggest festivals in Europe!

On August 24th, 35 years ago, Wacken Open Air’s first edition was held in Wacken, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Started as a local festival and as a two-day edition, now it has four festival days, more than 160 performers, and more than 80 000 visitors each year. Almost every style of heavy metal and hard rock is presented. Some of the bands that confirmed for the 35th edition of the festival are Airbourne, Blood Fire Death, Def Leppard, Emperor, Europe, Faun, In Flames, Nevermore, Powerwolf, Running Wild, Savatage
Sepultura, The Gathering.

The idea for creating the festival is of the two friends Thomas Jensen and Holger Hübner, when they went to a restaurant together. Thomas Jensen was playing the electric bass in Skyline band. Holger Hübner was a hard rock and heavy metal specialized disc jockey. The first W:O:A edition was held on August 24th and 25th,1990, with mostly local bands, in front of 800 visitors. The skull logo was created by Mark Ramsauer. It refers to the Kuhwiese (a cow pasture, where the first festival editions were held) and to Jensen and Hübner as “village boys”. Together they made the festival “the world capital of heavy metal”. These are the words of the Schleswig-Holstein’s Prime Minister, Daniel Gunther, who awarded them the Order of Merit of the State of Schleswig-Holstein in 2019 at the festival’s 30th anniversary edition of the festival.*

The things were not always successful for the festival and its two co-owners. In 1992 the festival started to invite world-famous bands, and because of the large amount of visitors, security, and additional costs for disposal on the campsite, there was a deficit of 25 000 Deutschmarks.

1993 is famous as “the plague year”. The organizers had a successful W:O:A festival with 3500 paying visitors and wanted to promote additional local concerts, which became a catastrophe because of a lack of visitors. This cost them debts of about 350 000 Deutschmarks. Jörg Jensen and Andreas Göser left the organizing team. Despite the debts, for which their parents provided guarantees, Thomas Jensen and Holger Hübner continued to run the festival. The same year Thoma Jensen’s mother died and Holger Hübner had a serious accident.

IIn the next years the festival situation was stabilized, and for the first time the national media took notice of it, especially Rock Hard magazine and VIVA television. The visitor number was 40 000 in 2005, 65 000 in 2006, and 75 000 in 2008. Along with the many world-famous bands, such as Scorpions, Doro Pesch, Helloween, Kreator, Twisted Sister, Dimmu Borgir, Slayer, Saxon, and many others that performed on its stages, the festival has started to enlarge the number of the stages and the festival area. There started additional amusements. Since 2002, for the festival fans, there has been the Metal Train from Zurich to Wacken and bus tours from Sweden and Austria. The same year started the “W:O:A Soccer Cup”, which teams are from fans. Since 2013 the festival “Full Metal Church” has started. Since 2006 the festival has operated an internet radio station, Wacken Radio. Now it is operated by Radio Bob. In 2019, for the 14th time in a row, all the festival tickets were sold out for the first four days of sales. There started other additional festivals: Full Metal Cruise, Full Mountain Madness, Wacken Winter Night, etc.

In 2020 and 2021, Wacken Open Air was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was streamed online for free as Wacken World Wide via MagentaMusic TV. After the successful return in 2022, there was big weather trouble in 2023, when terrible rain and mud has covered the festival area, and the organizers had to turn many visitors with vehicles back to their homes. After the calm of 2024, this year the weather was rainy, and the organizers hope that the next year will be only sunshine on the festival area.

It is still possible to find tickets for the 35th edition pf W:O:A here: https://www.metaltix.com/

*Source – Wikipedia