BLIND GUARDIAN - Feast Your Eyes! Page 3
by Martin Popoff

Once you see the DVD, you get a sense of what an undertaking it was. My first reaction was 'They must have borrowed that from Scorpions.' Not the case.

"No, it was totally custom-built for us," confirms Marcus, "the light design, the stage design, everything. We talked to our light designer and our crew, and we talked about what would be possible. We thought about even doing more. We had some gadgets we would have liked to have there, but it wasn't possible. Maybe next time. They started to set up the stage and everything on Monday and we arrived on Wednesday and we were blown away when we saw it. And especially when we saw the video material that the people were already filming on the days before we got there. We had no idea how everything was set up and how everything worked. It was really interesting, even for us, to watch this. Obviously, it was a risk doing this. Because we had no idea enough people would show up to cover the costs, because it was really expensive. But we were lucky. Everything went perfectly, and the feedback we got from the fans was just very positive, as was the feedback from the bands. Everybody was really happy about the whole thing."

Sure the band were blown away, but, as Marcus explains, the whole thing nearly got blown away...

"We were lucky. There were pretty heavy thunderstorms, a hurricane, right at the festival area when we did the soundcheck on Thursday, one day before the actual festival. And it almost destroyed the stage (laughs). There's footage in the DVD of this. And about five minutes later, somebody just started screaming, 'Everybody leave the stage; it's going to collapse now!' But luckily, nothing happened. And the second day of the festival, there was another storm coming towards this area, but he switched his direction and completely destroyed a nearby village. For some moments, we thought about canceling. But luckily, nothing happened."

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