Thomas De Maesschalck’s blog

This year was the third time I went to Rock Werchter. We left around 7 AM and about an hour later we arrived in Leuven were we had to take a 15-20min bus ride which dropped us about one kilometer from the campsite.

Campsite

 We went to Camping B0 (Dutch) and even though we arrived pretty early the campsite was already pretty crowded. But we did manage to find a nice spot, close to the forest and about a meter from us there was also a dike which separated us from a small river called the Demer.

 I took a lot of photos with my HTC S710 phone, more than 70 to be exact. I’ve included some of the photos in this article, you can click on the thumbnails for a bigger version. Here are some shots of the place where we camped. I slept in the silver/blue tent.

 

As usual you can find lots of different nationalities at Rock Werchter. Not only people from Flanders or Wallonia, but also lots of folks from The Netherlands, England, Germany, France and other European countries like Italy. In fact, I even saw some folks with an Australian flag and to be honest I’m not sure why these guys travel so far for a four-day festival here in Flanders lol   

 We slept four days at the campsite and personally I didn’t really have problems with falling asleep, even though it was sometimes quite noisy. Because we camped pretty close to a forest we got to see a lot more of  the local ‘wildlife’ than usual. I spotted a lot of snails, a small frog, lots of small insects, spiders and some of our neighbours even had some trouble with a small mice which somehow got into their tent   

The festival

And here’s a photo of the festival field. This picture was taken on the first day when the grass was still green and clean.

Four days later it looks more like a junkyard   :

There was also some art:

Overall the weather was surprisingly good. Weather forecasts predicted a lot of rain but fortunately it barely rained during these four days. On Sunday it even got pretty hot in the blazing sun but a couple of hours later the rain cooled everyone down.

Now lets take a look at which bands I watched/heard at Rock Werchter.

Day 1
Billy Talent
My Chemical Romance
Marilyn Manson
Beastie Boys
Muse

One of the bands I really wanted to see on Thursday was Marilyn Manson. Their show was pretty good but unfortunately the end got ruined because of technical problems   

Here are two pictures from the Marilyn Manson show:

Day 2
Enter Shikari
Kings of Leon
Kaiser Chiefs
Queens of the Stone Age
Admiral Freebie
Arctic Monkeys
Pearl Jam

Day 3
Heideroosjes
Razorlight
Snow Patrol
The Killers

De Heideroosjes were pretty good. This is a band from The Netherlands, they play Dutch and English songs.

Day 4
!!!
Mastadon
The Kooks
Interpol
Metallica

One of the best bands of the whole festival was without a doubt Metallica, their gig was stunning! I had already seen Metallica a couple of years ago but this concert was absolutely amazing. They played almost all of their best songs, the atmosphere was great and you could really see that they enjoyed playing for us. James Hetfield was very enthusiastic and there was lots of interaction. The Metallica concert lasted for more than two hours and the whole crowd was full of Metallica fans, sometimes we sang even louder than James Hetfield !

It hard to judge but I believe this Metallica gig was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen.

And they also brought some fireworks:

And to end, here’s a photo of me chilling out a bit.