The Girl with the Pasties Was Already Crying
Friday night at Ferropolis, the City of Iron: three Dutch guys dressed as sailors sprint past me toward the main stage, frantic, laughing. A couple to my left are wrapped around each other, her giggling, him shouting something about freedom and techno and physical love. And directly in my path, a girl stands frozen, her breasts covered only by a few colorful stickers, sobbing. Festival workers move her along gently. Then fire in the sky. Cheering. Bass. The Melt! Festival is under full power, and whether you make it to dawn depends entirely on what you’re willing to put into your body.
We’d arrived at the press and crew campsite earlier that afternoon, fighting tent poles under a sun with no pity. The priority wasn’t the lineup—it was not pitching our tent directly next to the toilets and the openly visible urinals. Which proved harder than expected. A persistent smell of ammonia and denser human outputs settled over the area. You get used to it. You don’t have a choice.
25,000 people made the trip to Gräfenhainichen that weekend, to the peninsula where the mining infrastructure of the old Golpa-Nord open-cast mine once stood—now reborn as a festival site of rusted cranes and industrial silhouettes against the summer sky. Woodkid, Disclosure, Babyshambles, Azealia Banks, Modeselektor were all announced. If you had the stamina, you cycled between stages constantly: screaming when Banks swung her hips, dancing when Modeselektor flooded the beach with beats, jumping in the smallest disco in the world when half-forgotten boy bands were briefly resurrected.
Stefan Lehmkuhl, the festival’s artistic director, called it the most relaxed Melt! Festival of all time, personally for me, and hopefully for the visitors too—with an ambitious lineup that could serve as a statement for what this festival stands for.
Perfect weather, bands on time, euphoric crowd. There were countless Melt! moments that made this festival so special and that can’t be described in words. Only those who were there know the Melt! feeling.
It doesn’t reach Coachella or Roskilde or Burning Man in terms of mythology or scale, but Ferropolis has something those events don’t quite nail: a loose hippie looseness, a genuinely spectacular backdrop, and—this is not an exaggeration—an objectively beautiful crowd. Young, built, and attractive, every single one of them, in this overheated place in more than one sense. We didn’t make sunrise on the first night. By three in the morning, our legs had given us notice. It was not quiet.
The next day I tagged along with a group of Berlin bloggers heading to the press center—a small room above the Philips-sponsored stage, stocked with cold drinks and communal laptops, a large flatscreen showing live feeds from the stages. Nike, 25, writes for the fashion blog This Is Jane Wayne and works for a German music channel. She was visibly stressed, coordinating artist interviews, dispatching editors. She’d been invited, didn’t pay for a ticket, but her free time was close to zero. She’d write about Melt! later: Fuck, I’m getting old. And I can’t do anything about it, boring creature that I am. My love for Melt! Festival is real. And yet my conclusion is: I’ve lost the ability to dance for three days straight and forget that Monday is coming.
Christine, 27, had been sent by a major German food company to hand out baked goods to festivalgoers. She stood in the flow of the crowd holding a cardboard sign reading "Cookies for Kisses," a colleague rushing over to help with the more-or-less-spontaneous stunt. No tongue though—her boyfriend was standing right there, vigilant. This year I got everything right,
she told me. I found the right people to drag me in front of the stage instead of disappearing into the campsite Bermuda triangle between the kebab stand, the camping chair, and the portable toilet.
She blogs at Lily’s Diary.
Julia was less at ease. When she’s not at festivals, she works in tourism promotion—New Zealand, Sweden. Here she was in the VIP tent, trying to conduct interviews for her music blog PonyDanceClyde: Sizarr, Mykki Blanco, Charli XCX. Her iPhone was full, the Dictaphone awkward, the logistics a grind. She got called backstage. At least the Sizarr interview went well—she’d known those guys since childhood in Landau. A few photos together, then they were on the big stage. She was back at the press center before the set was over, next appointment already waiting.
The regular crowd knew nothing of any of this. They queued at food stalls until their feet gave out, swam in the Gremminer Lake, danced without stopping on the Sleepless Floor. A naked young man walked toward me, his genitals covered only in white sunscreen. Gotta protect myself somehow,
he said, winking. He was not wrong.
The acts were a mixed bag. Woodkid, Azealia Banks, and Disclosure genuinely moved the crowd. But plenty of others struggled to fully claim their audiences. Social media consultant Thang wrote afterwards that The Knife, Trentemöller, and Modeselektor had an absolutely terrible day,
while Mount Kimbie, Claire, and Siriusmo were passable, and James Blake, MS MR, and Sizarr were simply too boring. Babyshambles and Kettcar felt like they’d wandered into the wrong festival entirely—aging dinosaurs in a sea of neon and uppers, confused about where they’d ended up.
It probably doesn’t matter that much anyway. An MSN survey of 2,000 festivalgoers found that only 45 percent said the musical acts were the reason they chose a festival. The rest came for everything else: sex, alcohol, drugs. 21 percent admitted to taking illegal stimulants at festivals; over 25 percent said they’d slept with a stranger. 13 percent had been in a fight. And 47 percent said they’d done something at a festival they would never consider doing outside the festival environment.
Which explains a lot about Friday night.
Georg, who works for a large software company, summed it up well: Dignity and commercial festival Melt! simply don’t mix. But that’s completely fine, because the moment you try to refuse the race to the bottom, you end up in the spiral of party death—spending the whole time being annoyed at everyone else instead of focusing on music and friends, which would actually be so much nicer. But hey—I’m not telling anyone to bury their face in glitter thirty minutes before the gates open or wear some idiotic costume. Let the others be idiots, just try to enjoy it.
Saturday night ended at four in the morning, when I got on the shuttle bus back to the campsite. Wrecked, sweaty, with the slow dawning suspicion that I might be getting old, and the persistent question of whether I’d do this to myself again next year. The air mattress and the soft pillow were my closest friends. Without chemical assistance you’re at a structural disadvantage here—that’s what I told myself. Sunday at exactly noon, the little blue Peugeot was loaded with everything we owned, and we drove two hours back to Berlin. Quick stop for Vietnamese food. Then my own bed. That felt like arriving somewhere.
The Melt! Festival is temporary autonomy—physical looseness, mental disinhibition, a day pass to the capitalist hippie paradise. If you can afford it and you surrender completely, it’s something. But each time you go back, it means a little less. Georg isn’t wrong. At some point you look up and realize the festival hasn’t changed; you just stopped pretending that it’s enough. If you want more, there’s Glastonbury, there’s Primavera Sound, there’s the whole world beyond the same rotating circuit of the same events every summer.
But the people are what keep this thing breathing. The three Dutch guys in sailor costumes sprinting toward the stage. The couple tangled together, giggling, shouting about freedom and techno. The girl in the pasties, crying in the middle of the path, festival workers leading her gently away. Without them, Ferropolis is just an iron ghost town, its cranes standing silent over nothing. Then fire in the sky again. Cheering. Bass. Dancing until morning—if you can last that long.