Due to the Covid, Hellfest 2021 will take place online again.

On the occasion of this "Hellfest from Home", accessible on the festival site, around twenty concerts are offered.

Guest of Europe 1, Friday, the novelist Amélie Nothomb recounted her own experience at Hellfest, in 2019, and her love for metal.

INTERVIEW

It is the meeting place for metal lovers.

The Hellfest, which gathered some 180,000 festival-goers in 2019, can again not be held because of the Covid-19, but will however take place on the Internet this weekend.

On this occasion, Europe 1 received, Friday morning, a famous novelist who has metal in her heart: Amélie Nothomb.

She was among the festival-goers of the 2019 Hellfest and refers to it as "one of the greatest moments of [her] life".

>> Find the morning show of the day in replay and podcast here

"Pure mysticism"

The universe of metal "goes well with my inspiration", confides the Belgian author. "I'm very mystical, I really like vertical swings, and that's very metal," she continues. "When you listen to the words of the metal, very regularly they are pure mysticism, sometimes even anti-mystical mysticism, because we invoke both Jesus and the devil."

Among his favorite groups, there are many unmissable ones.

“I started my career as a very classic metal fan with Metallica, and with Rage Against the Machine,” says Amélie Nothomb.

“Any metal fan considers Metallica a bit like his father and mother,” she adds.

But above all, the novelist says she devotes a special adoration to Tool, a progressive metal group, "little known but absolutely brilliant".

>> READ

- Music festivals this summer: who maintains, who cancels?

"I listened to it all, I lived it all"

It is also for the Tool group, which closed the 2019 edition, that Amélie Nothomb went to Clisson, a town in Loire-Atlantique, near Nantes, which hosts the Hellfest every year. “I did it from start to finish and it was one of the greatest moments of my life,” she says. “I did the four days from start to finish. I listened to it all, I experienced it all. When I left from there, it was two in the morning on Monday, after four days of constant metal, I was completely in a trance ".

Next year, for the 15th anniversary of the festival, it will not last four days but a week, spread over two weekends. In total, 350 groups will take to the now legendary Clisson stage. Among them, for the first time, there will be Metallica. Amélie Nothomb makes the promise: she will be there.