This time an impression from Sonisphere 2009 which was held last June 20th and where N. and yours truly went to. Way different in terms of atmoshere, music and audience then Pinkpop where we went three weeks earlier before Sonisphere.
Anyway, we had great fun and it was an enjoyable day. When we arrived at the festival the weather didn't look very promising. The sky was grey and while we were waiting to get in some raindrops were falling, but lucky enough it got dry when we entered and the rest of the day it stayed dry and I even got a bit sunburned.
The bands that were performing were: Pendulum, Kamelot, Lamb of God, Down, Korn, Slipknot and headliner Metallica.
The festival had a bit of a false start. One band, The Sword already cancelled one or two weeks before the festival, and after the doors opened short before the festival was supposed to start the organization announced that Mastodon also couldn't make it on time from a show 12 hours earlier in Austria. So that left 7 bands out of the original 9.
So now the festival opened with Pendulum, a band originally from Australia but now relocated in the UK. I didn't know the band and when they start playing it made me wonder what this band had to do on a heavy metal festival. Their music sounded more like a dance act with their Prodigy type of music (they also did a version of Prodigy's Voodoo People see here). So this band seemed a bit weird choice to me in the line-up, but the singer compensated it with lots of enthusiasm and they got parts of the crowd moving and that was not a bad result, because it's always an ungrateful job to open a festival around noon when most people aren't ready yet to party.
The second band was Kamelot, a kind of sympho power metal group. This band had some sound problems which made that the singer sometimes wasn't hearable. Picture 6 and 7 were shot during Kamelot's performance of the song "The haunting" with a guest appearance of Simone Simons of the Dutch symphonic metal band Epica, which can be seen here. The band Epica is named after Kamelot's 2003 album Epica and Simone Simons made some guest appearances on two Kamelot albums.
The third band that entered the stage was Lamb of God, a heavy metal band from the USA formed in 1990. It was obvious that a huge part of the younger crowd came for Lamb of God, judging by the many teenagers wearing Lamb of God t-shirts. They gave a loud, heavy and energetic performance and parts of the crowd got quite exited judging by the several mosh pits. The singer Randy Blythe was shouting/growling at the tops of his lungs proving that it requires training to sing like that. If I would sing like he did, my voice would be deceased within two minutes.
To give you an idea about the mosh pits, I've embedded a video after the pics that I shot of a Mosh Pit during the Lamb of God performance.
After Lamb of God the band Down came on stage. They are also from the USA, from Louisiana to be exact. I didn't know the band but they played a good and heavy set.
The report and pics from Korn, Slipknot and Metalllica I will post in the upcoming second post which I planned to post soon.
For now enjoy the pics and video
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Wonder from which band the woman in the middle is a huge fan?
The picture above and below to proof that the Kamelot's keyboardplayer didn't used hairspray
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