Few festivals provide a more dramatic contrast to their surroundings than Hellfest, a heavy metal music festival that took place last weekend in the peaceful countryside of Clisson near Nantes in northwestern France.
Lined by quiet, bucolic vineyards, inside it’s a vista from Mad Max: an open-air arena with fire-belching metal structures and laser-lit fountains situated amid a gothic steampunk wonderland. Past the arena there is a purpose-built town square, a comic book Camden complete with bars, barber and tattoo parlour. A giant crypt houses Hellfest’s official merchandise store. The six-stage event attracts approximately 240,000 black-clad metalheads over four days, and this year hosts rock royalty such as Mötley Crüe, Iron Maiden, Slipknot and Kiss. It’s the food and drink, though, that is a big reason for fans coming back year after year.
Sixty food vendors offer everything from oozing raclette baguettes and burgers topped with local cheese le curé nantais, to savoury galettes and hulking platters of Argentine BBQ featuring sausage and steak. Chips still reign supreme but a side of young potatoes and roast vegetables is common.
“I’m a chef and would say this is good food – not just for a festival,” says Luke, an eight-time Hellfest attendee from Castle Donington. “The variety is unreal.” He and his friend polish off generous portions of potatoes topped with pulled pork, washed down with cups of muscadet.
The festival campsite is surrounded by vineyards and muscadet is the local speciality. As Rancid play to a raucous crowd at the Warzone stage, local winemaker Sylvain Paquereau of Domaine de l’Epinay pours wine at the festival’s dedicated muscadet bar. “We make a special festival cruet which is sold in bottles with a special label,” he says. “We sell about 6,000 bottles every year during the weekend. And in the wine bar, with between 15 and 30 people serving wine, we sell about 25,000 litres.” Hellfest’s wine accounts for around 5% of the winery’s overall production, and the promotion is priceless.
“At first we were really surprised [by the numbers]; lots of people drink beer but they enjoy tasting other things like the wine of the region. French people know about muscadet but people from England and Germany see the vines around [the festival campsite] but don’t know what they are for.”
Paquereau says the freshness of muscadet, a dry white wine, lends itself to the June heat, with on-site temperatures topping 30 degrees, and is best enjoyed with oysters – a pairing served in premium hospitality areas. As well as being taken home by the 80 different nationalities that attend the festival, bottles of Hellfest muscadet are also left in artist dressing rooms.
Founded in 2006, Hellfest has grown into a worldwide metal phenomenon and taken Clisson, a town of roughly 8,000, with it. Signs around the town proclaim it Rock City; meanwhile the Hellfest site itself has been turned into a year-round public park and visitor attraction. Houses are rented out and local businesses capitalise on the metal euro: Benoît Payen of the local mayoral office says the festival brings in an estimated €20m to the local economy each year. Despite initial apprehension, he says the town is mostly on board with the festival, and it has placed Clisson on the global map.
“It was sometimes difficult for the people of Clisson – so many people dressed in black,” says Marc-Antoine Etourneau, director at Clisson’s E Leclerc supermarket, referring to the thousands of metalheads that descended on the town the first year. “But now we consider headbangers big teddy bears.”
No visit to Hellfest is complete without a pilgrimage to this supermarket: hordes of metalheads spill out of the festival each morning, many with carts, to stock up on alcohol and local produce including bread, cheeses and cured meats. The supermarket receives a full metal glow-up for the festival, with exclusive products, a stage, and stalls outside selling everything from drinking horns to battle jackets and themed hot sauces.
A triumphant Sunday closes with a Slipknot set that I pair with a brioche roll packed with lobster, crayfish, mayonnaise, celery and parsley salad, with a side of homemade crunchy matchstick frites and washed down with a muscadet. Then, a grand firework display that would give a certain theme park in Paris a run for its money.
The walk back to the tent passes by a game of “trolley jousting” with carts presumably liberated from E Leclerc: an unofficial tradition dating back to early editions of the festival. A few fleeting seconds of brutal collision and grappling are followed by energetic retrievals of fallen opponents and bear-like hugs. It’s the same exhilaration and camaraderie of Hellfests’s mosh pits – and a reminder that for all the rarefied gastronomy, metal was never about table manners.
