Some festivals take their name from Norse mythology. Others take it from the monthly raw-pork dinner a group of friends has been having for years.
The Mett(4)all Festival is firmly in the second category. It started in the summer of 2020, when Benedikt put on a festival in his own back garden because Covid had eaten the season. Afterwards he sat on the terrace with Christian and Dennis and said the sentence that founds every German institution: shouldn't we do this properly? Jan joined, a savings account was opened, a registered association followed. And since the friends met once a month to eat Mett and metal was the music they shared, the name took about ten minutes.
What is Mett? Raw minced pork, salted and peppered, spread thick on a bread roll and finished with raw onion. Eaten raw, deliberately, ideally for breakfast. Germans reach for „it is basically German sushi" when they want it to sound reasonable to visitors. A Mettigel — literally a Mett hedgehog — is the party format: a mound of the stuff shaped into a hedgehog, with onion spines. None of this is controversial here, which is the part guests find hardest to believe.
On Saturday 19 September the fourth edition lands at the Waldfreibad Walbeck near Geldern, out where the Lower Rhine is already almost the Netherlands. The open-air pool is not a fallback venue, it is the whole trick: opened in 1961, around 100,000 square metres of lawn, one of the largest lidos in Germany. The stage sits at the bottom, the crowd lies on the slope above it. Done with the pit? Lie down in the grass and watch from there.
60 kilos, and one of them is a hedgehog
The organisers are budgeting 60 kilos of Mett for the Saturday. It sounds like a number written for a press release, but it is the real feat of the weekend. Some context: on the Lower Rhine, Mett is not a party snack, it is a staple. The Mett roll is the mid-morning meal, the breakfast, the consolation prize and the full stop at the end of an argument; it sits at every butcher's counter and turns up at every village club do. For some, Mettwoch — Wednesday with the Mett spelled into it — is a holier fixture in the week than Sunday. A festival that names itself after it is not making a joke, it is giving its coordinates.
Even so, you do not add 60 kilos of raw minced pork to an order as an afterthought. That is the kind of order that produces a short silence at the butcher's counter and then an early shift. Ten bands you can book with a phone and some patience; getting a thousand fresh Mett rolls across a full festival day is a trade — and it is safe to assume that a few butchers on the Lower Rhine know exactly why their mincer is not getting a break this weekend.
Ten of those 60 kilos never make it onto a roll. They become one single Mettigel. Ten kilos of it. Roughly the weight of a guitar amp, only made of raw pork, with onion spines and no power supply. That leaves 50 kilos for the rolls, which works out at a good thousand Mettbrötchen — or somewhat fewer, depending on who is doing the spreading. According to the ticket shop they are included in the ticket, "for breakfast and late at night". Which is also why the gates open at 9:00. Mett is, nutritionally speaking, a breakfast food, and this festival takes that seriously.
One complaint, though
The logo shows an eagle clutching a Mett roll. Nicely drawn, right aesthetic, no clipart accident. But look closely — and we looked closely — and you will count exactly two onion rings on that roll.
Two. On an entire Mettbrötchen.
We are not accusing anyone. Perhaps the remaining rings are hidden under the talon. Perhaps the eagle is holding on that tightly precisely because it knows the topping would not survive an audit. But the picture is unambiguous, and since nobody else will say it, we will: with 60 kilos of Mett on site, the onion supply needs to scale better than it does on the coat of arms. A note for the 2027 edition, offered entirely without malice.
Ten bands, and half the neighbourhood
Top of the bill: Equilibrium — going since 2001, folk and pagan metal built from folk melody, bombast and blastbeats, and easily the biggest act this swimming pool has hosted.
Below them it gets pointedly local. Never Back Down from Heinsberg blend hardcore, beatdown and metalcore, with more than 250 shows behind them. CrashPilots come from Moers, metalcore, most recently with a live album cut at Die Röhre. Terradown drive up from Breda, 45 minutes across the border, melodic death and groove metal. And Aegror were founded in Geldern in 2009: progressive black metal and melodic death metal, telling the story of the Plaguebreeder since their debut "De Morbis" — a home game in their own town lido.
Then the Regensburg pair: Deadend, metalcore with their own DJ and heavy breakdowns, and alqemiste, who stir metal and deathcore together with trap beats and synths. Interia, Redish and Keep Me Alive complete the bill.
The running order
Gates open at 9:00 and the first band is on at 10:00, so turning up on time buys you exactly one hour of Mett-roll head start.
10:00 Terradown
11:00 CrashPilots
12:00 Keep Me Alive
13:00 Aegror
14:15 Redish
15:30 Deadend
16:45 alqemiste
18:00 Interia
19:30 Never Back Down
21:00 Equilibrium
The sets get longer as the day goes on: half an hour each for the three openers, 45 minutes for the afternoon shift, and a full hour each for Interia, Never Back Down and Equilibrium. The stage is done at 22:00; the site stays open until 23:00.
The practical bit
Tickets: Saturday day ticket 50 €, evening ticket (from 18:00) 35 €, weekend ticket 55 €, weekend with camping 70 €, camper van or caravan 40 € each.
Camping: Friday 18 September from 17:00 until Sunday 20 September, 13:00.
Entry: 18 and over; 16 and 17 year olds only with an authorised guardian and the signed youth-protection form.
Also: no own alcohol, no glass, free parking, bus RUF 35 from Geldern station (around 30 minutes).
And one line you rarely read in a festival FAQ: "all cash machines in Walbeck are currently out of service due to bombings". The nearest one is in Geldern; on site, cards work.
What is left is the point of the thing. The association promotes rock, metal, punk and alternative music on the left bank of the Lower Rhine because almost nobody else there does, and it books local bands by preference. It also raises money for the Ronald McDonald House in Essen, where families of seriously ill children can stay during treatment — one member of the association came through cancer himself and got to know the place that way.
So three numbers are settled: ten bands, 60 kilos of Mett, two onion rings. We would only renegotiate one of them.
