Taubertal Profits Washed Away

Organizers insist the event isn’t threatened, but picking up the tab for prepping the site for this year’s Taubertal Festival in Germany will wash away a lot of what it’s accumulated from nine successive sellouts.

"It means we have a lot less in the coffers and much of what we’d built up will be gone, but we still have easily enough to continue and we will definitely be back next year," festival press officer Florian Zoll explained.

Five days of continual rain meant the festival was set up as its Rothenburg ob der Tauber site turned into a quagmire. Organisers had little choice but to mount a smaller-scale version of the recent mud-clearing operation that cost the 60,000-capacity Wacken Open Air an estimated euro 500,000.

"We were pumping the water out and there were so many times when we were on the verge of just giving up," Zoll said. "It was taking so much time that it was becoming impossible to get on with our job of setting up the festival.

"We managed to do it but there were many times when we didn’t really believe that we would."

The organisers of the 2,000-per day Rock-am-Schloss Festival near the northern brewery town of Jever, which was scheduled for the same August 10-12 weekend, were forced to do just that after torrential rain left the site underwater.

Folkert Koopmans’ FKP Scorpio offered fans a reduced-price ticket to switch to its M’Era Luna Festival, 200 kilometres away at Hildesheim.

The rain continued through the first two days of Taubertal, although the sun did manage to put in an appearance on the third day.

Zoll said P!nk appeared to go down extremely well with the 12,500 crowd, which also gave a great response to Gentleman & Far East Band and Gogol Bordello.

The other acts getting wet at Taubertal included H-Blockx, Madsen, Kashmir, Juli and Leningrad.