5. Triptykon performing Celtic Frost – Ronnie James Dio stage - Saturday, August 12th – early evening

I’ve been pretty fanboy gushing over our three headliners, but if I am honest I am much more excited about the trio of special guests that will grace the stage immediately before them. Celtic Frost were a big deal and remain quintessentially influential. Therefore the mastermind behind them, the eccentric genius Tom G. Warrior doing a Celtic Frost set with his latest musical prodigies Triptykon is well worth getting excited about.

Celtic Frost were distorting the confines of metal long before we even knew that this was possible. They looked at all the defining lines being drawn up in the eighties and simply decided that they did not apply to them. Where others went left they went right, when others jumped they kept their feet firmly on the ground.

Sometimes they got it spectacularly right and with “To Mega Therion” and “Into the Pandemonium” they took metal in an avant-garde direction decades before anyone else in the genre learned to spell the words. Equally, they got it spectacularly wrong and their exercise in glam metal “Cold Lake” is still used to this day as shorthand for career suicide.

Triptykon will celebrate the Celtic Frost that shaped black metal. The Celtic Frost that influenced a generation of disenfranchised Scandinavians to put on the corpse paint and pledge their allegiance to the big guy below. So get ready for an exercise in history and legacy that you wont forget.