Anyway, I left in the evening on Thursday, after a rather embarrassing false-start due to the fact I am about as good with dates as I am with public transport. Now, bearing in mind the festival itself is over the weekend, that should give you some idea of how long the journey was: three hours on the train up to Watford, then 14-odd hours on the coach with an hour in the middle somewhere on the Eurostar to get to Hildesheim. Thankfully the journey was not as monotonous as it could be, due mainly to the fact that everyone on the bus was so lovely and friendly that we could all spend a lot of time nattering (and drinking quite a lot. I think I've drunk more over those four days than I had for the last four months put together).
Finally, after a long but reasonably comfortable journey and a brief stop-off in a German supermarket to stock up on booze and biscuits, we arrived at the festival site, an hour or so later than scheduled. That hour's difference meant a very long queue (which isn't a lot of fun while wearing a very heavy 60 litre backpack I can tell you) and a fairly full campsite; it took us a good half hour or so to get our wristbands and trudge half-way across the airfield (M'era Luna is held at Hildesheim airfield, in case you hadn't gathered) to find somewhere to pitch our tents. After another half-hour or so of frantic tent-arranging (I am still astounded at my amazing tent-errecting skills. Especially considering that my tent-demolishing skills are so impossibly weak) it was time to explore the site.
Now, I've been to a couple of festivals in the UK and generally the facilities there were pretty weak, you know the score; foul smelling portaloos, cold chips and stalls selling dubious-looking legal highs. Well, M'era Luna is not like a UK festival. It has hard-standing, flushable toilets; decent and relatively warm showers; good quality, good value food; stalls that sell interesting things worth having; regularly cleaned portaloos (complete with loo roll)... it's like the five star hotel of the festival world. The site itself is split into the campsite area, which also houses a mock pagan village and the bathroom facilities, and the festival site itself, with a selection of twenty or so stalls, a fair number of beer tents and bars and two stages; the open-air main stage and a secondary stage in an aircraft hanger. We spent most of Friday evening chilling out in the pagan village, mainly because it's there you can buy the impossibly tasty Wikinesgblut (cherry mead... possibly the yummiest alcoholic beverage I have ever tasted).
The pagan village was fun; lots of pretty people playing the lute and the bagpipes and fire-dancing and whatever, lots of fun stalls selling leatherwork, fancy outfits and drinking horns, there was even a blacksmith. There was a really jolly, carnival-style atmosphere there; lots of silly audience-paritipation games and the like, including a game involving sitting on a beam and hitting people with a sack.
Anyway, by the time it got dark we were all pretty tired, so after a few beers back at the tent it was time to call it a night. Naturally I woke up far too late the next morning, and most of the others had already gone, so I was left to shower and do silly things to my hair in my own time. Even basic things became thrillingly surreal there, just wandering around with twenty five thousand goths milling around me, or getting dressed in my tent while in the distance a band onstage were playing a cheeky industrial version of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, it was wonderful. I can honestly say I've never seen so many goths, and it's a strangely lifestyle-affirming thing seeing the variation, the humour and the friendliness of them all. Goth is good, people, goth is very good.
I headed down to the hanger stage and caught my first band of the festival. I still don't know who they were, they were on instead of Qntal, but they were really very good. A cheerful neo-folk industrial outfit with bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies and suchlike, and they spent a lot of time punching the air and going "hey!" I really must find out who they were because they were great, and by the time they left the stage I had a stupid big purple-lipstick grin on my face.
Next up were the lovely Faith and the Muse, opening with some very dramatic drumming (using what looked to me like taiko drums but probably weren't) before Monica waltzed onstage bedecked in red and purple and singing in an exquisitely haunting manner. Their set was criminally short, and it looked like they thought they had longer too: Monica left the stage for William Faith to take up vocals for a track, then she wandered back on and announced that "apparently that's the end". The end? Already? I have no idea why they were on so early or had so short a set, they deserved to be far higher up the bill, but the snippet (about half an hour to forty five minutes) that we got was wonderful.
Next on in the hanger was Brendan Perry (formerly of Dead Can Dance) who has a lovely voice and makes lovely music but was a little too mellow for the claustrophobic and sweaty-hot hanger, so after a few songs I had to sneak off to explore.
Outside on the main stage, Stolen Babies were already part-way through their set. They're a slightly silly band; a little too screechy and metally for my tastes but they have a few tracks with an enjoyably dark-cabaret edge and they had some rather spiffy outfits (all of them were wearing tattered Neo-Victorian dresses, even the men). While they were thrashing about onstage, I took the opportunity to have a look around the festival area and buy some much-needed beverages and merchandise (namely a handy lanyard with a laminated programme attached to it, an umbrella which I used as a parasol for the rest of the day, and a fabulous new Sisters of Mercy t-shirt.)
There was a long wait between their set and the start of Laibach's, a wait exaggerated by technical problems and their intro looping over and over until Fras stomped grumpily offstage to grumble at the roadies. When they finally started they were excellent; moody, militaristic and theatrical, and they played Tanz Mit which always makes me happy.
It was incredibly hot and by the time they finished, we were all starting to resemble gothic beetroots, so it was time to slink off to the beer tent as there was no one we were particualrly keen to see for a while. I could hear most of Nitzer Ebb's set from the tent, but I didn't think much of it; it wasn't exactly bad but it certainly didn't grab my attention. Thankfully the next band on, Unheilig, did grab my attention. I'd not heard of them before, but their a neue deutsche harte band along the lines of Rammstein, only much more cheerful. Cheerful to the extent that at one point the singer had everyone waving cigarette lighters around and swaying, and honestly seeing twenty thousand odd goths holding little lights and swaying was just adorable. Plus they have a song called Fur Immer which I beleive is German for "forever" but sounds a bit like "for Emma" and this makes me happy (for those readers who don't know me outside of the internet, my name is Emma; sadly I can't get a passport that says "postpunkpixie")
I was really impressed by them. Their singer is an excellent showman, lots of running about and rallying of the audience, lots of flag-waving and what-have-you, and combined with a set designed to look like the prow of a ship and screen projecting pretty pictures and odd lyrics, it was quite a show. I definitely need to download some of their albums, and so do you. Look them up now, I'll wait for you. Found a song? Good isn't it? (If you sign up for their mailing list on their site you get a free medley. It's worth downloading)
Once they left the stage, it was time to wait for Mr Eldritch and company. It was quite a wait as, of course, some unfortunately buggers had to set up the Sisters of Mercy's enormous lighting rig, smoke machines, and the huge mass of wires and knobs that is Doktor Avalanche. And when I say enormous, I mean it: Mr Sticks and I had to spend the whole of their set wearing sunglasses (at eleven o'clock at night). Smoke utterly enshrouded the first fifteen or so rows before a group of tiny, vague figures strode onstage. Eldritch was a particularly tiny figure; short, bald and clad in a white hoodie and sunglasses, and standing with his legs so far apart he was in danger of ripping his trousers, but he sounded fabulous. Now, I've always been put off seeing the Sisters, since I've heard horrible things about their sound engineers and Eldritch's waning voice, but their show proved the difference that a good sound engineer makes. They were perfect.
Their set was a run-down of hits played in elegant arrangements: we had Marian, Dominion, Lucretia (albeit in a very shortened version), Alice, Temple of Love, and some a nifty medley version of Doctor Jeep and Detonation Boulevade that I actually preferred to the record. Needless to say, I had the biggest, silliest grin spread over my face by the time they finished.
Sunday was a far more laid-back affair, with only a handful of bands I was particularly keen to see. We started with Colony 5, who reminded me of a more repetitive version of Depeche Mode; latter-day synthpop that wasn't entirely to my taste but not bad at all. They had a lot of projections and things going on behind them that were quite interesting, one track had lots of pictures of various alternative models, and like Unheilig they had a habit of putting their lyrics up behind them, maybe it's goth karaoke.
After they finished there weren't any bands any of us where particularly fussed with, so we had a look around the stalls and grabbed some food and beer. I think we probably caught a band or so in the background but nothing that really stirred my attention away from my beer. Since there was no-one exciting on for a while, we went back to the tents for a while for a rest (several days in very large boots was getting pretty wearing) before it was time to stomp back to the hanger. On the way, we came across some elegant people on stilts in the pagan village doing a bit of a pan play. I particularly liked the unicorn lady who was scattering confetti and the butterfly lady who had dyed her tongue blue.
I caught the end of Feindflug, a rather generic stompy German industrial band, who weren't bad but weren't anything special, then slunk down toward the front for Skinny Puppy.
Sk'uppy's set was almost identical to the gig I saw last week (Ogre had the same oufit, complete with smoky hat) but minus a few tracks (the encore was shortened and Magnifishit was missing) but they were thoroughly excellent again so I can't really complain. And this time I managed to get photos too, so I'm doubly happy. I really didn't mind that it was the same show, he's such a magnetic performer I could watch him all day.
Some of my pictures even turned out visible! I can tell you're all just as shocked as I was.
The hat! I love that hat, it's somewhere between the papal tiara, a dunce's cap and a chimney stack. If only more performers would do weird performance art stuff that actually seemed to mean something.
Just after they finished Assimilate, a German fellow who'd noticed me dancing and singing along like a lunatic came over to ask what the name of the song was. He'd never heard Sk'uppy before and was loving them.
Why hello there prosthetics-less Ogre. (Yes I am developing a crush on him, why do you ask?)
Anyway, alas Sk'uppy's set had to end, and after grooving through Worlock, they left the stage. On the main stage, meanwhile, we had some equally theatrical nonsense going on thanks to thoroughly mad metallers In Extremo, who were lighting the stage up with flamethrowers and flashbangs while playing hurdy gurdies and bagpipes. I wish their set hadn't clashed with Sk'uppy because they looked like an awful lot of fun.
Sadly the festival ended on a bit of a bum note; Placebo, who I have to confess to quite liking, were plagued by the worst sound I've ever heard (worse than the Southampton Guildhall!) It moved from side to side, flickered in and out and the bass was turned up far too loud, drowning Brian Molko's lovely voice completely. It clearly was no fault of the band, apparently from the first few rows, where you could hear the monitors, they sounded great. From everywhere else the speakers rendered them painful and the festival ground soon emptied. Time, we decided, for a last glass of Wikingesblut before heading back to the tents to finish the last of the kegs of beer (and much associated silliness which is probably best kept out of the blogosphere).
So... M'era Luna: probably the best fun I've had since the Pete Murphy incident, and if not, definitely the best fun I've had since uni. And definitely worth the many many long hours on the coach. Hopefully I'll have the money to do it all again next year.
I'll leave you with a little video that Howard put together, which is thoroughly brilliant. I particularly like the understatement regarding the queue for the wristbands.
And yes, I have plenty of interesting things to post in the blog in the coming weeks, and yes I promise I won't forget to post them this time.
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