Soaked at Hurricane
Four stages blasting alternative rock for three days straight, mud, beer, crowds thick enough to lose people in, and that weird electricity that happens when thousands of drunk humans compress themselves into a field. That was Hurricane Festival 2011. I went with a group—Sara, Isa, Thang, Flo, Alex, Christoph, Thomas—all of us there with press passes that made us simultaneously invisible and enemies of the actual festival-goers.
The setup was almost absurdly comfortable. While everyone else was sleeping in tents that slowly filled with rainwater, we were in a guesthouse with beds and running water and a kitchen. When the weather came in hard, which it did constantly, Wenke and I would drift into the press tent where they had dry facilities and a bar and screens showing the stages. You could stand there and experience the entire festival without actually being in the festival, which sounds great in theory but felt like cheating in practice.
We couldn’t exactly advertise this. The second someone clocked the laminated pass, clocked that we were clean and dry and well-fed while they were covered in mud and regret, we’d become the thing to resent. So we’d put on a stressed expression, move quickly past security with some half-lie about being late, keep our heads down. The irony of that paranoia—that we were so worried about seeming soft that we actually stayed soft instead of just enjoying it—is not lost on me now.
I missed Lykke Li, who was actually the only reason I’d scheduled this whole thing. It was the one act I actually cared about seeing, and instead I was somewhere pretending to be busier and more committed to the festival experience than I actually was. Stupid. That’s genuinely one of those moments you don’t get back, you know? Some of it was unavoidable, but some of it was just cowardice dressed up as professionalism.
The bands themselves were hit or miss in the way festival lineups always are. Hercules and Love Affair were good. Glasvegas were genuinely terrible. Blood Red Shoes put real effort into it, William Fitzsimmons was aggressively boring. Flogging Molly hit harder than expected. My Chemical Romance felt like a band that nobody had told it was 2011 yet. The rest blurred together, which is what the rest always does at these things.
What stays with me is the weird stuff that’s not really a story. Teenagers in various states of dissolution stumbling out of the portable showers. A conversation in the grass with Wenke where neither of us said anything for maybe twenty minutes because we were too tired and the silence felt less awkward than words. Walking past people’s tents at 4 AM and feeling this strange mix of superiority and guilt. The way a field smells after three days of rain and crowds and no real sanitation—not good, but distinctive, memorable in its own gross way.
Katja Hentschel shot photographs over the weekend, and whatever she actually captured is better than what I remember seeing. I haven’t looked at them in a long time, but they exist somewhere. That’s how things last, I guess—not in the experience itself but in the frame you caught of it, the angle, the moment someone else decided was worth keeping. Everything else just erodes.