The Journey

Living in Portsmouth made getting to Hellfest a piece of cake. The ferry to Le Havre took around 6 or 7 hours overnight with LD Lines. The cabin was simple and comfortable and allowed for a nice sleep before the onward journey. Happily the beer was also cheap, Newcastle Brown was £1.50!

After getting off the ferry the journey was pretty straightforward. The only thing that you really need to be careful about is paying the tolls on the roads. On this journey we had to pay about 35 euros each way which is quite a lot of extra spending. The total time for the drive was about 3 and a half hours. This passed pretty quick with normal back of car antics!

The Site

The site at Hellfest this year was great, as you arrive there seemed ample parking for everyone (although by the end of the first day people seemed to be parked on roundabouts and traffic islands and stuff) and the campsite was large enough. During the festival festival staff kept the campsite clean (yeah, they actually came round and cleared up your mess for you). The walk from the campsite to the festival was relatively short (about 5 minutes) and had a couple of beer bars along the route just incase you felt like a top up.

Toilets and Stuff

The toilets and wash facilities were generally good and cleaned daily. A bit annoying that you had to pay 5 euros to get into the wash tent but it was really nice to have it anyway. Toilets in the festival arena were good and they even had a set of wash basins with potable water for free in the festival area. This, coupled with the ability to take empty bottles into the arena meant you could keep hydrated all weekend (important through the heat this year!).

Arena

Good size stages and plenty of room made for no complaints about the arena. It was all set out nicely with trees for shade, a large eating area and a good metal market with plenty of CDs and t-shirts. Only complaint was that there were very few hats on sale. This weekend they would have made a killing on the sale of general summer stuff.

Bands

Awesome lineup! Never been to a festival with so many bands I wanted to see. This year a few of the best bands for me were:

Iced Earth - Having seen them at Wacken last year with Ripper Owens and also having loved the Alive in Athens CD I was excited about the prospect of seeing this bands with Matt Barlow and it all came off excellently. The old songs sounded perfect and even the new songs recorded with Ripper Owens sounded great with Barlow on vocals.

Primordial - One of my favorite bands they didn’t disappoint me this time. The crowd seemed to really get into it with frontman Nemtheanga showing that he really is one of the best frontmen in metal.

Carcass - A band I never thought I’d see live they came across really well and sounded great, was awesome to see it and am looking forward to seeing them again later in the summer.

Death Angel - Ace! Saw them a few years ago at Wacken and this time round it was just as good.

The whole festival took slight turn for the amusing in the beer tent in the afternoons when a band whos name I don’t know came on and played the most hilarious set I’ve ever seen. It seemed to consist mainly of a guy taking his trousers off while a drum machine lead the beat and an elderly woman hit a tambourine. The guitarists had hilarious wigs (I hope) on and at some point the accordian player and guitarists had sparklers on the end of their instruments. Truely hilarious.

General

It was great. The French seemed to like to party all night as well, which was a plus. The whole thing was organised a whole lot better than I expected. The local supermarket seemed to provide all you needed. The arena was great and the whole weekend was great.

If I have time I might put up a bit more indepth stuff about more stuff!

• Don’t use a mallet when setting poppers or rivets.
• Getting design transfer onto a small object done is difficult.
• Tom can’t do art so well!

But generally it was alright and here it is:

So to begin with, here is some of the first bits and pieces I’ve made out of leather recently.

This one is a horse from a book by Al Stohlman which I did a while ago. I really like the simple design and it gave me a lot of confidence in using a modelling spoon.

This one is a flower from the same book and gave me some practice using other tools. I’m not hugely happy with the centre of it and could probably do it better now but haven’t got round to it just yet.