METAL FESTIVAL TO SHAKE CALGARY
Nurse organizes headbangers’ extravaganza
It is her dark secret. It’s something that Terese Fleming may not want some of her friends to know.
Perhaps that’s why the organizer of the Noctis V heavy metal festival and conference is a little tentative to reveal it. She is — gasp! — a nurse.
“The two don’t mix,” Fleming says with a laugh of her worlds. “My nursing friends don’t get this. They just don’t get it.” Well, a great many others do and are anxiously awaiting the start of the local event, which gets underway tonight and continues through to Saturday at various venues in the city, including Vern’s and The Distillery. Now, technically in its sixth year — last year was a scaleddown show dubbed Noctis 4.20 — the event collects together fans, bands, media and industry folk from the international metal community for three days of celebrating the more underground side of the music and those who make it.
For Fleming, the fest was about helping to serve what she saw as a need in the vibrant but underserved western Canadian scene, noting that for years there were events like it in other locales such as Montreal but nothing much of note closer to home — until a friend suggested she change that. “For a long time there were only a few and they were treated like Mecca. So once a year metalheads would scrounge and save all of their shekels and have to make a really long trip at great costs to see some bands that they knew they would never see otherwise, that would never come to North America,” says Fleming, who also runs local company Scarab Productions. “Then I was simply challenged by the idea so I guess I set out to see if it would work and see if I could do it.”
Turns out she could.
That inaugural event was enough of a success — albeit with enough learning opportunities thrown in — that Fleming kept going with it, determined to steadily grow Noctis into something that would be its own Mecca for area fans, who were more than willing to support it as not only patrons but volunteers.
2010’s Noctis IV showed that they were on the right path with the U of C’s MacEwan Hall Ballroom — the venue for the main concert — almost selling clean. Unfortunately, last year prior, long-standing commitments to travel with friends as well as Fleming being diagnosed with a thyroid condition meant that a full-blown fest was impossible.
This year, though, Noctis is back and bigger than ever — and dubbed Baphomiss — with the concert part expanding from two nights to three, and featuring a whole host of local, national and international talent from various metal sub-genres including: American progressive act The Contortionist; B.C. doom metallers Hoopsnake; veteran Virginia grindcore band Pig Destroyer; longtime purveyors of death metal Nunslaughter; and, the headliner for the Saturday show at Mac Hall, Venom.
“The original extreme metal band — Welcome to Hell,” Fleming says with a laugh of their debut, noting the English band who were one of the pioneers of the thrash metal movement haven’t been around these parts in over 25 years, making it a very big coup.
“Venom does not do a lot of festivals every year,” she says of the group, who also released the genre defining Black Metal album in 1982 and are still led by original member Cronos. “They do maybe a half-dozen, maybe, a year, so the fact that they accepted this invitation is really awesome. They have fans going back 20-30 years (and) we have people coming from Florida, Arizona, California and Quebec who are flying in to see Venom.”
That get is testament to not only the longevity of the event, but also the great reputation Noctis now has in the community across the globe.
It’s something that can also be seen in the names of some of the speakers they attract to the conference, which has also grown this year to two days from one, and has in the past attracted such notable metal figures as Canadian documentarian Sam Dunn (Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey) and U.K. author Ian Christe (Sound of the Beast).
“I think the word is spreading so it’s getting easier to attract these people,” says Fleming.
She points to this year’s crop of insiders speaking at this year’s convention, including respected metal journalists such as Joel McIver and Martin Popoff, as well as record reps and promoters who will be assembling for panels and talks on everything from photography and band management to the history of the metal T-shirt.
Days before the sessions were scheduled to start, the convention side of Noctis has almost sold all of it 150 available passes — a cap due to the logistics of the venue, the downtown Ramada, which is the official hotel and which Fleming is quick to praise.
“When you walk in and say, ‘Well, we want to do a metal festival and conference,’ not a lot of hotels in Calgary would go, ‘Oh, sure!’ But they have just been awesome,” she says and laughs. “And there haven’t been any major incidents, which a lot of people would assume. But actually metalheads are a pretty peaceful bunch.”
But, then again, maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone. Let’s let it be their dark secret.