The final day. We rose at a reasonable time and realised we were all out of beer. Hans walked off to see early bands while we kept on going on into down to find out that the small supermarket was closed on a Sunday. Argh. Fortunately, there’s another supermarket around a corner which we hadn’t used before. Popping round there, we managed to get the last of the – sadly low-alcohol- tinnies and lugged them back to the campsite.

I managed to miss Lauren Harris for not the first time. Mainly because I’ve heard nothing but scorn poured in her direction. I know her dad’s a rock god, but by all accounts her own band sucks. Besides, beer and food were more important.

I made my way into the festival area in time to catch Apocalyptica coming on and had a good listen. They’re OK, and certainly novel, but not on a par with Hayseed Dixie when it comes to doing covers. Each to their own. After them, I popped into a marquee to see Soilwork with Pete. They put on a great show, but there’s no doubting that their best material was from Stabbing the Drama.

As we walked out of the tent to meet everyone else, I saw a familiar face walk past. It was Melanie from the previous day – quite a coincidence as she was only walking past to find her mates. We hooked up again and she kicked around with us for the rest of the day. I guess Brits are more fun than Germans…

Bullet For My Valentine are hard to take seriously in their “We are metaaaalll… from the Valleys” Welsh accents so they were pretty much ignored. We headed back to the campsite to make the most of the beer rather than watch Avenged Sevenfold (I’d eat my own ears rather than listen to A7X) where we discovered that Melanie had much better beer than I’d picked up. Got to love those Germans – they do come in useful at times.

We did head back for At The Gates, In Flames and Arch Enemy. The latter did keep asking for updates on the football as the Euro 2000 final was on, and the lead singer is German. A good job nobody told her they lost…

Of course, the big band of the day was Iron Maiden. They drew the biggest crowd that Graspop has ever seen and justifiably so. Hans even sang along to some of the songs! The stage show was superb, the song choices excellent, the whole buzz of the crowd amazing. With a great mix of songs, predominantly from Piece of Mind, Powerslave, Somewhere in Time, and Seventh Son along with the obvious classics they rocked for around 2 hours before letting loose an enormous Eddie mummy.

Show over and Always Look on the Bright Side of Life being sung by tens of thousands of metalheads as they made their shaky ways back to the tents. Partying continued late into the nights, though. Just because the bands were done, didn’t mean that the beer would stop flowing!