Hellfire Festival, 8th November

Last Sunday afternoon a small posse of us ventured down to Birmingham to the Hellfire festival being held in the exhibition centre. The original 3 day affair had been scaled down to 2 days, allegedly due to lack of interest, and this made getting information about when bands were playing rather difficult. Luckily we managed to establish a day or two before the event that "It's open from 12" and "The main stage starts at 5", at least. Since nobody I knew cared about any bands not on the main stage we got there a little after 4 to allow darkwaveart a chance to do his various press-related things for an hour before it all started.

At first there was a lot of wandering around the concourse aimlessly because the main stage was behind closed doors and the other stage was rather underwhelmingly signposted, confusingly labelled as being 2 stages, but was really just 1. (There was a fourth/third stage too, currently under construction.) We went in and found a stage in a conference room where about 50 people were watching some awful band. We stayed for 2 minutes, then left again. I've no idea who the band was because there were no running order posters anywhere around the venue that we could see.

Apart from a half-mile walk to find a working cash machine, we just ended up waiting around outside the entrance to the main stage area until it opened. While there I encountered a variety of people following the same routine of wandering around in mild confusion. First up was hakucho_cygnus , along with the not-terribly-talkative (at least to me) neojezebel , followed by my Romanian friend Ada (who I didn't recognise at first, oops. Girls are always much shorter in real life...), and a bit later synphony came by and was probably the first and last person I saw that day who had any idea what was going on.

At shortly after 5pm the doors opened and we made our way inside. The main stage was of a decent size and ambience, and there were a few stalls along the back and a rather odd bar area past the stage in a rather bleak warehouse/aircraft-hangar style setting. It felt a bit like the indoor Bloodstock events, except a little less cosy. Before long I met a few other people, eg. omghellokitty , infestchris , etc. At one point I also got talking to a random redhead called Claire (or Clare (or Clair? who knows)) who was there on her own and had a strange half-Aberdeen half-Birmingham accent which sounded distinctly like it came from the Southern Hemisphere. I got my picture taken with her and someone else (might have been Leilani, I forget) by some Vince character who I think yourapocalypse will know. "This might be in Metal Hammer - not the next one, the one after that" he said. I hope not, for the sake of everybody's eyes. I also shook DJ Beerman's hand, though I don't know if he knew who I was. That's ok, because sometimes, even I don't know who I am.

On to the bands then: Serotonal were good, although I still can't describe them adequately. (They're certainly not 'doom' despite how often that term is thrown at them, and 'dark rock' is far too wide to carry much semantic weight.) October File were awful (and almost everybody I spoke to agreed). Katatonia were great, but played exactly the same set I'd seen in Sheffield the previous Wednesday. Anathema opened with the first 4 songs from 'Alternative 4' which was a bit of a masterstroke, but with only 4 more songs to go it meant neglecting the majority of their back catalogue which is always a shame. Luckily the last song was 'Sleepless' featuring their original vocalist Darren White, which was great to see. After them came My Dying Bride who, since the last upheaval of their line-up, seem to like playing a mix of new songs and the more obscure tracks from their history which means I have little idea of what they played. It sounded fine, however. Finally came the Fields Of The Nephilim, goth icons that I was keen to see for the first (and probably last) time, and they put on an atmospheric and engrossing show. Possibly an odd choice to close a metal festival, since even though they play metal these days it's not their metal albums that they're most famous for. Still, I don't think many people went away disappointed.

Barring the last-minute disaster that nearly arose when Pink found out that he'd lost his car key (quickly finding it in the pub, quelle surprise), getting out and home was trouble-free, although standing around at 11:30pm in 3 degrees Celsius in just a t-shirt was an interesting experience, even for one so used to braving the icy winds as I.