Dockville 2010: Friska Viljor rock the dock! (Photo: Nicole Runschke)

After last week’s post about how Germany as a country is unexpectedly well-versed when it comes to BBQing, here’s another post about a thing that Germans are great at, but that isn’t really associated with them – yet.

And that thing is: festivals. Now, when people hear the word festival, they tend to think immediately of Woodstock (USA), Glastonbury (UK) or maybe – if you like your peace-and-love a little more recherché – Roskilde in Denmark. What a growing number of people across Europe are starting to associate with the term, however, are names like Watten, Hurricane, and Melt - some of the continent’s biggest festivals and all of them taking place in Germany.

Rethe Speicher, an impressive festival backdrop (NR)

Why Germany, then? Partly because of its prime location at the heart of Europe, making for easy road-tripping and interrailing access for the young and alternative crowd. Another reason would have to be the German knack for good and thorough planning, allowing them to successfully stage festivals the size of small cities. Yet probably the biggest single factor in this is Germany’s huge range of brilliant festival locations. There is no shortage of disused industrial sites on a massive scale – especially in the former East – and these make genuinely impressive backdrops for banging techno beats and grungy rock guitar chords.

Take Dockville, for example, a small-to-medium-sized festival which has just taken place for the fourth time on a patch of former docklands right in the middle of Hamburg’s huge harbour. I decided to go down to it – and camp there for two nights – to get to know this part of town, at once so central and yet so distant. So on Friday, laden with a tent, a BBQ, and provisions for three days, we got off at the Wilhelmsburg S-Bahn station and took a slightly rickety-looking shuttle bus through streets that are only five miles from my flat, but whose names I’d never even heard of. Soon, the gigantic Rethe Speicher warehouse was looming overhead, and I knew we’d arrived at Dockville.

There is something bizarre and limbo-like about being on a camping holiday in the city you live in; you’re close to home in geographical terms, but far away in terms of your thinking. Because, let’s be honest, all we had to think about was putting up a tent, drinking a beer, and then deciding which bands to see.

Dockville is not just about the music; it's about art, too, man! (NR)

This latter task, however, proved far harder than anticipated. With two big stages, several smaller locations, and a whole bunch of other stuff to do and see, we were in danger of starting to do things that we might do at the flat a few miles away, i.e. making plans and setting alarms – all the small annoyances of everyday existence.

Is it okay to call this art? Well, it sure was a lot of fun! (NR)

So we took it easy, seeing a great mixture of chilled indie (Friska Viljor), proper rock (We were promised jetpacks), and mildly violent-sounding hip-hop courtesy of KIZ. Alongside that, we also fitted in some serious techno (Frittenbude) and a round of oriental-flavoured shisha pipe music played by the Bucovina Club. In between, we took tours around the art-installations spread around the site, which ranged from the abstruse and almost pretentious through to the purely and deliciously childish.

And when we’d had enough sizing up swings, seesaws and model ships made of sugar and having our eardrums blasted, we’d toddle off back to the camping ground for some a spot of down-time with our tent-neighbours, drinking, smoking and generally doing all the stuff you’re supposed to do at festivals.

Hmm, BBQ, uhuhuhh. (NR)

Nevertheless, I’m never one to just sit around drinking myself stupid without some form of elegantly whiling away the hours. And since the festival took place so close to home, I’d been able to take my wheeled BBQ and cool box out for a little excursion, allowing us to keep us – and the inhabitants of the tents around us – happy with a good supply of sausages, bread, and salad. What with the German love of grilled sausages, we made ourselves very popular.

Which came very much in handy as we were packing up on the last day of the festival, and the rain clouds started gathering; we were able to leave our tent and assorted baggage in our neighbours tents, since they were planning to leave a day later. As Jan Delay was almost rained off by a deluge of near-biblical proportions, we took comfort in the fact that, despite our being soaked through to the bone, the tent was fine. The return trip was cold, wet, but not at all long, and we even had enough time for a hot shower before bed.

So even if Germany as a whole might not be the ideal location for festivals in terms of its sometimes quite inclement weather, the individual locations – impressive and as easy-to-reach as they are – are simply unbeatable.

Thanks to Nicole Runschke for braving the rain and taking all of these photos!