ROYAL HUNT

After the top notch performance we’d just had from Ken Tamplin we wondered how on earth Royal Hunt would follow that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people wearing Stratovarious t-shirts at an AOR festival before as I did today. Indeed Royal Hunt have a reputation among the prog rock/power metal brigade and today they’d turned out in force to watch the band perform.

Royal Hunt’s music was such a far cry from a lot of the bands we are used to seeing at this type of festival but given the huge response they got from the crowds of baying fans, it’s perhaps a genre of music we should be considering including a bit more of in future festivals.

You should have seen the sea of people headbanging and giving the horns to ‘People Of Hate’ Whoah! Two bands getting the horns in one day, surely this can’t be right? Must have been all those rousingly heavy, almost anthem like, epic songs the band kept doing eh?

Although their music wasn’t exactly my own personnel cup of tea, there’s no getting away from it, their set was awesome. The end of the set came all too soon for a lot of people in the crowd and although this might very well have been the bands very first UK appearance, something tells me it won’t be their last. Indeed should the band see fit to tour the UK with their forthcoming album ‘Eyewitness’, I think they’d be looking at more than a few sell-out gigs.

Whether this type of metal is your thing or not, you’d be hard pushed to deny lead vocalist John West has an amazing set of lungs on him. For a lot of people here today this band was the one they’d make the trip here to see and after chatting to friends afterwards, it seems they felt they’d got their money’s worth and then some from this band alone.

I guess that’s why the crowd just kept on shouting out for me and were graced with an encore from the band. All in all the set lasted for nigh on an hour and a half which wasn’t bad at all.