Location: Podreča / Slovenia
Interview date: June 17, 2009
This year’s Slovenian metal festival Paranoid Open Air is the logical continuation of Metal Mania Open Air, which took place in Komen every year until now. This time, for reasons of circumstance, it’s been moved to a car test track in Ljubečna near Celje. Paranoid Open Air will once again be a huge draw with its varied lineup covering different shades of metal, and its importance is big. It’s the first real metal festival where Slovenian organizers hold all the reins. It’s a festival that gives a solid bunch of Slovenian metal bands, who we know play great music and badly need gigs in front of a crowd to promote it, a chance to show what they’ve got. Alongside the Slovenian acts, this year’s bigger international names in metal are: Atheist, Candlemass, Blaze Bayley, Agnostic Front, Beneath The Massacre, Hate Eternal, Necronomicon, Misery Index, Obscura, Onslaught, Psycroptic, Theatres Des Vampires, Erec, Ram, Kozeljnik. There’s something here for the hard rockers too, since the Slovenian band Requiem will be spicing up the festival with their set. You can read all the news and the most important details about this year’s Paranoid Open Air on the festival’s official website, as well as on the festival’s official MySpace page.
Boštjan Zavrl, one of the festival’s organizers, chatted with RockLine about the story behind this year’s Paranoid Open Air festival, which, as mentioned, takes place August 13–15 in Ljubečna near Celje.
RockLine: There’s no Metal Mania Open Air this year. Paranoid Open Air is happening instead. Can you shed some light on what led to this new reality?
Boštjan: The main reason was that the local youth association ŠUZ from Komen somehow lost the real interest in working with us and organizing Metal Mania Open Air. The association couldn’t find a common consensus that would make it worth continuing to organize the festival in Komen. We knew we had to keep going. The Metal Mania name belongs to ŠUZ, so we can’t possibly claim it as ours. At the same time, since that chapter had ended that way and we were changing location, it seemed totally logical to change the festival’s name too. The rest of the team that used to co-organize Metal Mania stayed the same, it’s just that ŠUZ is no longer in the picture. Given that the metal webzine Paranoid has been involved with the festival all these years and is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, we decided the festival should be called Paranoid Open Air. We’re a little sorry about leaving the Komen location. It was a special place, a special space… Maybe the festival will go back there someday.
RockLine: Did you have any trouble finding an acceptable spot for the new festival?
Boštjan: The location was very hard to find. We were only able to officially confirm it in the last few days. We were negotiating about, for example, holding the festival in Kamnik or Lesce. In some places the problem was that the space was too small, elsewhere the obstacle was the late hour when the festival day ends, and at yet another location the landowners didn’t agree. The key thing was the permit we got from the municipality that allows excessive noise levels in the environment. Among other things, that permit says festival days can run from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m. the next day. There are still a few formalities we need to sort out, but those are minor.
RockLine: If I bring the other metal festival in Slovenia, Metal Camp, into this, do you feel Paranoid Open Air can offer the crowd something Metal Camp can’t?
Boštjan: We’ve always been working in that direction. We managed to do that to a large extent with Metal Mania already. Paranoid Open Air is first and foremost about people hanging out together and promoting Slovenian bands. But to draw more visitors you have to bring in foreign bands too, which of course takes the whole thing up to an even more interesting level. We’ve built on these essentials all these years, and that’s how it’ll be in the future too.
RockLine: How do you pick the bands that play the festival?
Boštjan: Our starting point is to create a lineup that represents the main strands of heavy metal as evenly as possible. That’s why it’s good that several of us organize the festival together. Dirty Skunks, Paranoid, KLG, so each of us knows a certain style of metal inside out. First we pick the main headliners. Mostly those are foreign bands. Once they’re locked in, we focus on filling the rest of the bill with our bands. This year there are also two Austrian and two Croatian bands playing, and we treat them the same as the Slovenian ones.
RockLine: I guess you get a pretty big rush of Slovenian bands wanting to play Paranoid Open Air. What kind of sieve do you use for them?
Boštjan: That’s really tough. To be honest, there are no bad metal bands here anymore. There were 120 applications in total, counting requests from Austria, Hungary and Croatia on top of Slovenia. This year we decided not to give Italian bands a shot, because of the move to a new location. Given that all the applicants are very good, the basic criterion is trying to offer something at the festival that hasn’t been there before. So priority goes to bands who’ve never played our festival. That cuts about half of them. The next criterion is musical styles, which have to be represented more or less equally. We start from three main ones: heavy and power, thrash, and death metal. Within a style you then weigh the better band against the weaker one, as well as how popular they are with the crowds. At the same time, we always try to give a chance to a band that’s still totally unknown, maybe one that’s played at most five gigs in their career. I think two such bands are playing this year.
RockLine: What about the warm-up show the day before? Will there be one this year as part of the festival?
Boštjan: Last year it was at Stara šula in Komen. This year there’s technically a possibility, but it’ll be hard, if it happens at all. We’ll see. There’s a lot of interest from other people, especially locals from Celje and the surrounding area. This year a warm-up show will be very hard to pull off, because the track where the festival takes place is in use until 6:00 p.m. the day before the festival starts. So we’re very limited on time. Besides, in Komen it wasn’t a problem. The Stara šula location was available the whole time. This time we’re really tight on time. The moment activity at the track ends the day before the festival starts, we have to be there and start setting up the stage and all the logistics. So there probably won’t be time for a warm-up show. You have to keep in mind that we do everything ourselves. The crew, the organizers. We set everything up ourselves, we tear everything down ourselves. Completely voluntary work. That’s probably also the difference from the big festivals, which have a huge machine behind them. I already know we’ll get home Sunday night totally wrecked, and I’ll probably need at least two days off afterwards, ha, ha, ha…
RockLine: Do you think the new location near Celje could bring in more people from the Styria side of Slovenia, or does that not matter much, given that Slovenia is one of the smaller European countries by area?
Boštjan: No. Where you hold a festival in Slovenia doesn’t matter in that respect. You can drive the whole country, end to end and side to side, in three hours.
RockLine: What are the basic differences between the new location near Celje and the old one in Komen?
Boštjan: We always have to point out that Paranoid Open Air is the continuation of Metal Mania Open Air. That’s necessary for the sake of references and to make it easier to reach our goals. As far as infrastructure goes, the new site in Ljubečna near Celje is a lot better covered than the previous one. It’s a track with electrical hookups and water. The stage itself will be bigger this year. At Metal Mania it was 10m x 8m, this year it’ll be 12m x 10m. The sound guy will be the same as last year, because he has everything under control and we trust him.
RockLine: Yowda (Tomaž Frelih – Yowda, guitarist of Lady’s First, editor’s note.)?
Boštjan: Yes. Yowda. Except the sound equipment for this year’s festival has been upgraded even more.
RockLine: How are tickets selling right now?
Boštjan: Ticket sales have only just officially kicked off, actually. As for the bands that sell tickets under contract, they report the numbers to Peter (Peter Gregorc, one of the festival’s co-organizers, editor’s note.). If I’m not mistaken, they let him know every 14 days how many tickets they’ve sold.
RockLine: Have you ever thought about expanding the live offering with a late-autumn event, say just for one day, indoors, a one-day festival?
Boštjan: I think there’s a huge amount going on in the metal scene here. In a way the situation is already a bit oversaturated. Twenty years ago, to exaggerate, there were maybe two gigs a year. Whether you were a heavy metaller or a black metaller didn’t matter. You went to see both. You know how it is today. You can pick and choose where you’ll go.
RockLine: I think it’s great that Haliaetum Open Air has appeared too. It’s at a different location, it doesn’t clash with your dates, and the lineup goes in a different direction as well.
Boštjan: Yes. That’s really good too, that Slovenia has gained another metal festival, in this case Haliaetum Open Air in Izola. Precisely because it offers a different direction, a different approach. It’s a different festival and just by that it adds some variety. Although in the end it targets practically the same audience as ours does. Luckily metal has the most loyal fans.
RockLine: Okay, here’s a question that isn’t “What’s your favourite colour baby?” Which band would you, as an organizer, love to bring over to play your festival? Hypothetically, let’s not worry about money.
Boštjan: I’m lucky to be in a position where I can really push through a strictly “my own” band. Two years ago, for example, I brought over Vendetta. Last year Pro-Pain, Exodus, 3 Inches Of Blood, this year Necronomicon and Onslaught. Personally, my biggest wish is to bring Razor over someday.
RockLine: It’s really important that you keep that “underground” feeling through all of this, that you’re not stuck-up, that you don’t have the arrogance and pomp that money usually brings, which pushes the authenticity of heavy metal culture away from the crowds…
Boštjan: If you want a mass event like Metal Camp, you know what you have to bring in and you also know how much it’ll cost you. At our festival, though, even if plenty of people don’t know a lot of the bands on the bill, if they dig in and listen, they’ll find out that all of these bands are really good. So I’d like to use this chance to urge people to listen to the music, through the links we have either on the official Paranoid Open Air website or on the Paranoid Open Air MySpace page.
RockLine: It’s a good trick to bring over bands that, say, put out one, two, three albums 15 or 20 years ago, then vanished from the scene even though they left their mark on it. Now those same bands are playing again, but they’re not exactly easy to catch on stage, unlike bands à la Nightwish, Edguy, Amon Amarth, who keep releasing albums and touring non-stop these days, putting out albums that are as alike as two peas in a pod…. It’s a great move on your part to bring in bands like Atheist, Necronomicon, Candlemass, Onslaught. It’s like wiping 20 years of dust off a diamond so it shines in full again…
Boštjan: Really, if you want to show the crowd good thrash, you don’t need to bring Anthrax to Slovenia. Vendetta, for example, who played here two years ago at Metal Mania Open Air, played one of their first shows after 20 years of silence. A band like that playing adds to the appeal of a festival like ours. On the other hand, our costs keep growing year after year, especially when it comes to infrastructure requirements. But that’s totally logical. The thing has to keep growing, keep moving toward the best possible offering. Always.
RockLine: That’s how you earn the trust of the crowds, the public.
Boštjan: You can already see it with the bands themselves. They offer to play our festival ahead of time. I’m talking about the bigger foreign names. For this year, for example, we got an offer from Pestilence. Word spreads fast from one band to the next. The whole thing revolves around a circle of maybe 15 managers anyway. Besides a quality lineup, we’ll put the biggest emphasis on making sure visitors feel good. Above all, security will be much better looked after, and the toilet capacity will be increased. There’ll be a “shower container” on site again this year. When we got it, it was completely wrecked, unusable. It needed a total overhaul, from the pipes to the boilers. We fixed it up entirely ourselves. Last year the rush on that container at the festival was so big that the three-hundred-liter boiler ran out of hot water pretty quickly, so people had to settle for cold anyway. There won’t be any shortage of a mini shop for the most basic necessities either, and it’ll be open first thing in the morning. We’ll make sure the security guys are there to protect people, not beat them up. If any of them so much as raises a hand against a visitor, he’ll be sent flying home from the festival that very moment.
Rockline: Is there any surprise still hiding that’s strictly top secret for now?
Boštjan: Not really. We’re still missing one band, though.
RockLine: A bigger, well-known foreign name?
Boštjan: Yes. And from the black metal genre. It’ll be a band that the people who come to our festival definitely know. Right now we’re in talks with the band, and if we close the deal and they join the festival, they’ll be the cherry on top of the sundae. I wouldn’t want to tell you which band it is, though, because we’ve been burned so many times on this. Everything was already arranged once and then the band didn’t show up. Last year, for example, Gorgoroth cancelled their already confirmed show at Metal Mania Open Air, with the argument that they were heading into the studio to record. Even though they’d confirmed the festival gig.
RockLine: Last year, during Metal Steel’s set at Metal Mania Open Air, the sky opened up. You barely saved the venue. What happened?
Boštjan: We were forced to literally chase Metal Steel off the stage, because otherwise the roof over the stage would have collapsed right onto them. The guy who put up the roof hadn’t stretched it tight enough. During the downpour, so much rain collected that a hollow formed in the roof, and it kept growing and growing… At first we tried pushing the water out with poles, but there was so much of it that it was impossible. So we stopped the festival for a while, lowered the roof so we could reach it by hand, and emptied the hollow by hand. Then the roof was stretched back tight. We lost about an hour at the festival. If everybody hadn’t come running together so fast to save the stage, there could have been a lot of damage. One of the horizontal roof beams was bent into an “S” shape. Totally useless after that, of course. But the roof’s owner didn’t complain about anything. It was all his fault, since he hadn’t stretched the roof enough when he put it up over the stage. Anyway, better not to imagine the roof burying the “metalheads” under it. That would have been a catastrophe. That was an experience I’ll definitely never forget in my life. That’s when you see who’s the real deal. Who jumped in to help right away, and who’s the one who only shows up at the venue now and then asking, “Everything cool?” and vanishes again God knows where.
RockLine: So what are your expectations for this year’s Paranoid Open Air?
Boštjan: I just hope as much as possible of that Komen feeling carries over to this year’s festival. I’m convinced the place is what gives people something. It leaves them with a recognizable mark you can’t find anywhere else but there. I remember well a quote somebody wrote on the Paranoid webzine forum, that just by arriving in Komen you’re automatically drunk. You know, there’s no better feeling than being there on, say, the Saturday of the festival during the second-to-last band of the day, enjoying the view of the mass of people in front of the stage, all of them having a blast, having a great time. Then the genuine, friendly gestures, the healthy communication between the bands, which show how good they feel, how relaxed they are, and the maximum commitment they then bring on stage with great performances. I don’t need more than that. I don’t even think about money. It definitely doesn’t bring me a feeling like that.
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