The story
Hurricane Festival in Scheessel
Hurricane Festival, staged at the Eichenring speedway track in Scheessel, traces to a 1973 rock concert and was relaunched under its current name in 1997, drawing around twenty thousand attendees at its first edition and more than eighty thousand in recent strong years. It runs as a twin festival with Southside Festival near Lake Constance, sharing an almost identical lineup across the same three June days at opposite ends of Germany.
Scheessel's connection to large rock concerts predates the Hurricane Festival by more than two decades: a 1973 event called 'Es rockt in der Heide', or 'It's rocking in the heath', brought performers including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Lou Reed to the same Lower Saxony town, but the tradition lapsed before being revived in 1997 under a new mayor and a new name.