Everything Worth Hearing at a Flooded Coal Mine

Störmthaler See is a former lignite mine turned festival ground—one of those East German reclamation projects that ended up accidentally scenic. Highfield has run there every August, and the 2010 edition assembled a lineup that made the poster worth keeping: Placebo headlining, Blink-182 freshly reformed and playing every set like it might be the last one, Band of Horses doing their widescreen Americana somewhere between the stages, OK Go being reliably elaborate, NOFX and Billy Talent holding down the punk end of things.

There’s a particular feeling a lineup like that produces—something between nostalgia and hunger that hits before you’ve thought through the logistics. I spent the late nineties with Blink-182 on constant rotation, and their reunion carried that careful-watching quality: glad they’re back, braced for diminishment, not sure the Enema of the State guys were going to be twenty-three again in any way that counted. But Band of Horses at dusk near water is a separate argument—the kind of live experience that justifies the mud and the overpriced beer and the long drive without ever needing to make a case for itself.

Festival lineups at this scale make promises they can’t always keep. You show up for the headliners and come back with a memory of something smaller on a side stage that you stumbled into between sets and couldn’t name for a week. That’s the real deal—not the poster, but what happens in the gaps. The Highfield poster for August 2010 was good enough that I suspected the gaps were probably worth it too.