Qualla: Hurricane Festival

Hurricane Festival: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas Meixensperger, CC BY 2.0. The man who booked the bands for the 1977 festival at Scheeßel was a twenty-five-year-old bank clerk, and by the second night it was obvious he had already spent the money. Acts that had been announced never arrived — some because their travel costs were never guaranteed, some because they had been paid in full up front and saw no reason to come. The Hells Angels hired as stewards walked off the job when their own pay failed to appear. In the small hours, fans who felt cheated and stewards who had been cheated set fire to the stage and to the organiser's trailers. Instruments burned. People were injured by falling sections of steel scaffolding. The mayor shut the festival down, and for twenty years nothing rocked in the heath.

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Image: Andreas Meixensperger | CC BY 2.0

Hurricane Festival: It Rocks in the Heath

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas Nowak, Public domain. The first festival here ran on 8 and 9 September 1973 under the name Es rockt in der Heide — It's rocking in the heath. For a village of farms between Bremen and Hamburg, the bill was absurdly good: Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chicago, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Lou Reed. The b...

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Image: Andreas Nowak | Public domain

Hurricane Festival: Break-Even at Twelve Thousand

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zach Klein from New York, New York, USA, CC BY 2.5. It took a new mayor and a persistent promoter to bring the music back. Folkert Koopmans, working with a local company, talked the Scheeßel administration round, and on 21 and 22 June 1997 the festival returned under the name Hurricane — thirty-six bands over two days on two stage...

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Image: Zach Klein from New York, New York, USA | CC BY 2.5

Hurricane Festival: A Sand Track in Open Country

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas Nowak, Public domain. The site is the Eichenring, a motorcycle sand track — a speedway oval ringed by trees and, for one weekend a year, by tens of thousands of tents. Nothing about the surrounding country suggests it should work. The heath is flat, agricultural and quiet; the nearest thing to a skyli...

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Image: Andreas Nowak | Public domain

Hurricane Festival: The Night They Pumped the Field Dry

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tetris L, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 2016 edition sold out on 23 February. Then the weather arrived. Day one lost two hours to a thunderstorm warning, and the organisers were in no mood to gamble: a lightning strike had injured dozens of people at Rock am Ring, fifteen of them seriously, and the festival was aba...

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Image: Tetris L | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hurricane Festival: The Animal on the Screen

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kupets643, CC BY-SA 4.0. Since 2013 the Spanish artist Dani Blázquez has drawn a new animal for Hurricane every year: a pink owl, a blue wolf, a green boar, a red fox, a green bear, a purple lynx, a green racoon. It fills the stage screens between sets, papers the app, and hangs on banners across the gro...

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Image: Kupets643 | CC BY-SA 4.0