Everything Except Lykke Li
The Hurricane Festival ran four stages of continuous alternative rock across a field in northern Germany, and I was there as press, which means I experienced approximately thirty percent of it in any honest sense. That’s the version I’m going with.
I had a lanyard, a guesthouse bed, and a breakfast with actual calories in it, which already disqualifies this from counting as a real festival. There were pedal karts in the garden of the pension. At four in the morning, Wenke and I wandered into a nearby patch of forest and spent half an hour staring into it—not out of any spiritual impulse, just because the silence felt genuinely bizarre after days of PA systems and there was nowhere else to go.
When the weather turned ugly—which it did, reliably, with real commitment—we retreated to the press tent and watched the concerts on a flatscreen while Beck’s Lime appeared from nowhere in steady supply. Bands were playing in the rain outside. We were drinking indoors. I have thought about this and I have no regrets.
The socially responsible option would have been to blend into the paying crowd and pretend we’d earned our misery. We did not do that. With the help of photographers who knew how to work a restricted-access situation, we talked our way into sponsor backrooms and wherever else the lanyard would open a door. The AXE promo shower trucks were parked near one of the stages, and people emerged from them looking improbably good. We watched from the grass with the detached appreciation of people who had access to actual bathrooms.
The music, when I actually saw it: Hercules and Love Affair were genuinely on fire. Glasvegas were shockingly bad—I felt secondhand embarrassment for the people who’d queued. Blood Red Shoes delivered everything they needed to. William Fitzsimmons put me to sleep, though not unpleasantly. Flogging Molly turned out to be a better time than I’d have predicted. My Chemical Romance felt like a band being slowly suffocated by their own mythology—technically functional, emotionally long past their moment.
The one act I had actually come to see was Lykke Li. I had traded a free weekend for this specific reason. I missed the entire set. I’m not going to explain the circumstances. It doesn’t get discussed.
What survives in memory: a teenager vomiting against a fence at noon, an inflatable penis somewhere near stage three, a gas station burger that still haunts me a little, failed police checks at the campsite perimeter, the slowly rotating ceiling of the press area at 2 a.m., small sock-related secrets that will stay where they are. The photos are Katja Hentschel’s. They’re better than the weekend deserved.