The festival started on thursday and runs until saturday late night. Laura had bought us four tickets for the friday concert with (in our eyes) the biggest act on stage of the whole festival.

The concerts started that day already since 12:30, but we didn't bother go there before 18:30, because we wanted to see only the greatest artists performing on stage. 

NorwayRock is a festival for hardrock- and metal fans organised in Kvinesdal. The festival is at the Øyesletta part of Kvinesdal (outside Liknes), next to the Elva/Fjord and the road to the big bridge. The terrain was really huge this time and very well organised. 300 people worked voluntary on backstage, guarding and catering. There was ofcourse police, fireman and ambulance/redcross also for the safety of us all.

We arrived just at the moment that actually W.A.S.P. was supposed to start, but instead they have been swapped around with Testament and therefore we had Testament as first. This band performed better on CD and MTV then on stage was our idea, but perhaps that's just because we are not that much a fan of that kind of shouting and screaming metal.

After each great stage act there is a break (and another smaller stage is playing smaller bands) in which we got half a liter cola for our four (had only 120 nok in our pockets) for 25 nok and later on I (Steven) got a small sausage (or rather a bread with a bit of sausage!) for another 25 nok. T-shirts and other merchandising stuff was waaaaaay too expensive (we better order stuff over Ebay or Finn).

The second concert we saw was the band called HolyHell who works together with the people of ManoWar (managed by ManoWar even). The drummer was from ManoWar. Their performance was much better then that of Testament, but I still think that they could do some work on stage performance and working with the public. It was more a - let's play these songs and go again - kind of repertoire.

Then another break which took a bit longer than usual to enter into the big act: ManoWar. ManoWar hasn't visited Scandinavia for many years and was finally back. One of the organisators, I read earlier this week, had used a loan on his house, so that he could pay the first payment to get ManoWar to Norway. The ManoWar concert was completely sold out and suddenly there were not 3000 people dancing and waving, but more than 10.000 people.

ManoWar was really amazing and these guys (in the 50's at least) know how to play for a big public and to get the public involved. They played a really great and long set with several well-known songs which were sung along by the full public. Also the mayer of Kvinesdal had some words to spend to the public. ManoWar also thanked the organisation in a special way with balls of steel and had a little word for them. The singer of ManoWar also tried his best on saying some funny (and rude) things in Norwegian which made the public go even wilder.
When the band played we had one big rainstorm, but that made the effect of this band even bigger and the public didn't really care about it either. 

Although the band was supposed to play for not longer than 1,5 hours, they played for more than 2 hours. Another great event was that they asked the public for a good guitar player. One boy from Oslo came on stage and had to play some of his arts on the guitar. A bit later a lot of girls came on stage (backstage people I think) to dance and to energize the guitarist from Oslo. Then the band played a song together with him, wherafter the boy was allowed to keep the guitar and got autographs written all over the guitar.
After that all the band continued their set and at 02.30 the band finished off with a last song and we all went happy and energized home. 

Thank you NorwayRock 2009! Perhaps next year again!

Update: Laura also wrote about the concert.