Wacken Open Air 2009 was a huge disappointment for many metal fans. In 2008 the world's biggest heavy metal festival has booked Iron Maiden as headliners and has raised the bar a bit too high for its own good. In 2009, the 20th anniversary of this legendary festival, a lot of bands appeared which have played in the years before already, but no uber headliner a la Iron Maiden to justify the high ticket price. Many people blamed the W:O:A to rely on its name only as the 20th edition was sold out eight months prior to the festival. In 2010 however the Wacken Open Air proves all these critics wrong...

Iron Maiden are back again! And this time they aren't the uber headliners of 2008, but only primus inter pares ("first among equals"): thrash titans Slayer, glam metal monsters Mötley Crüe and the father of shock rock Alice Cooper are also confirmed as headliners for the 21st edition. And as always there are a few special performances: Grave Digger celebrate their 30th anniversary by performing the entire "Tunes of War" album, a show which will also feature some special guests, while Swedish gothic metal pioneers Tiamat will be performing their legendary "Wildhoney" album, 20 years after the band Treblinka mutated into the Tiamat we know today. But even if you don't care for either of these bands, Wacken once again offers a wide array of metal styles for almost everyone: black metal with Immortal and 1349, death metal with Cannibal Corpse and grindcore supergroup Lock Up, power metal with Kamelot and Stratovarius, heavy metal with U.D.O. and W.A.S.P., modern metal with Fear Factory and Soulfly, etc. etc. etc.. All in all a whopping 122 acts will perform on five stages over a period of four days.

Wacken Open Air takes plays in - surprise! - Wacken in Northern Germany, a small village with merely 2,000 inhabitants on 361 days of the year. The town is located 10 km north of Itzehoe and 50 km northwest of Hamburg. There will be shuttle buses from the festival site to the train station in Itzehoe as well as to the airports in Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck. For more info on getting there and away check the festival page here.

Certainly not the cheapest, but probably the most fun way to get to and from Wacken has to be the Metal Train. The "railway to hell" equals one huge party of 850 metalheads in one train with 16 wagons, which includes two dedicated disco wagons. Check the website for the schedule and prices.

The festival is officially sold out since April. Most tour operators (e.g. Metal Train for Germany, Bock Tours for the Netherlands, Germany, Austria or Switzerland, Argon Events for the UK) still have tickets in stock though.

Another way to acquire your ticket would be the ticket exchange in the official forum which aims for eliminating the black marketing going on eBay and reducing the risk of acquiring fake tickets. In this exchange the Wacken staff supervises the ticket prices and acts as trust which means that the seller sends the ticket(s) to the staff who verifies the authenticity of the ticket(s) and reports it to the buyer. After the buyer has transferred the money to the seller, the Wacken staff will pass on the ticket(s) to the buyer. More information on this model can be found here (in German).

Further readings:
Wacken 2009 review
Wacken 2008 review
Wacken 2007 review