New!!READ THE REVIEWS about this show (Rock Hard, Metal Hammer and Metal Heart) New!!

On July 1rst a dream became true! Manilla Road live in Europe, in Germany!

The BANG YOUR HEAD Festival is a great event every year made by the German magazine "Heavy oder Was". Like the WACKEN Open Air, they always try to re-union bands from the past and this year they brought us MANILLA ROAD and WATCHTOWER. As we all know now, Manilla Road is NO band from the past, it is a band with a future.

When we first visited the festival ground on Friday 30th of June we saw a lot of people wearing MANILLA ROAD shirts, mostly Crystal Logic or Mystification motives. We couldn´t believe our eyes! We saw a lot of bands including the Scorpions that were much better than expected.

The next day MANILLA ROAD entered the stage at 12:30 and a lot of fans presented their self painted banners...they came from all over Europe just to see the Road!

Fans from Greec

Mark Shelton checked his guitar first and he looks a little different with his now short hair. When he screamed the first words into his microphone the fans run mad! The two new bandmembers come from his new project SHARK and it seems like they were accepted by the crowd within a few seconds. The bands starts with OPEN THE GATES followed by DIG ME NO GRAVE. The playlist also includes "Necropolis", "The Riddle Master", "Witches Brew", "Death by the Hammer", "Hammer of the Witches", "Masque of the Red Death" and of course two brand new SHARK songs that fitted well to the classic MANILLA-stuff! I expect a killer album!

The new drummer had some problems with the older material but you need to know that he is in the band for a few weeks (and he married within that short period!!) and Randy´s "special" drumming is not so easy to play. All in all he did a good job and proves how excellent he really is when he played a short solo. On the two new songs he did a great drumming! I hope the press don´t writes any bullshit about this...Another but typical festival-problem was the sound that wasn´t very clear, but it still was good enough to enjoy the show!

With that songmaterial the band couldn´t do anything wrong and there was more crowd in front of the stage as other bands had in the afternoon. The fans were singing the refrains of the songs and even the manager of Iron Glory Records (Crystal Logic re-release) was in the crowd banging his head! Everybody had fun - also the band!!

Mark Shelton´s voice was very "rough" this day and some fans who prefer harder stuff start to show interest in the band on the stage when they played "Up from the Crypt", a very fast track from MYSTIFICATION.

"Hello Germany!"

Too bad the band wasn´t allowed to play any longer (...always the same with those time-shedules on festivals...there was a big clock on stage!). It seems like they were booked to the next WACKEN OPEN AIR in 2001 and then they will kill again!

After their set the band enjoys seeing WATCHTOWER on stage, then they gave autographs to their fans! Read the full-interview with the new MANILLA ROAD on a special page on this site!