Heavy metal music festivals serve as endurance tests for attendees, to the point that they modify their pain tolerance. This is according to a study published in the journal "Scientific Reports, revealing that metal fans suffer temporary increases in their pain threshold during these music festivals. The research explores how metal, a genre "associated with negative emotions such as anger", could help manage the discomfort of patients with chronic pain. The work, done by theMax Planck Institute for Cognitive and Human Brain Sciences (Germany), compares two groups of 60 people, one of which is made up of attendees of Wacken Open Air, one of the most important heavy metal festivals in the world, based on measurements such as pain tolerance, sensitivity, and heart rate variability.

It was early morning, around five o'clock, and the truck of the German heavy metal band Accept was returning from performing at Santa Coloma de Gramenet, as part of the Barcelona Rock Fest festival, and was heading towards Germany. The driver stopped at a rest area on the AP-7, near Llinars del Vallès, to handle some bureaucratic matters. According to the festival, four men armed with iron bars tried to steal everything they could. One of them even tried to enter the driver's cabin, which he did not succeed in doing. According to police sources, the Mossos d'Esquadra have already opened an investigation.

A few months ago I visited Birmingham and was surprised by the number of people boasting about being the city where heavy metal was born. And they kept recommending that I take a picture on a bench located in a canal area, where a few years earlier the City Council had held a tribute to the band Black Sabbath. It was full of people of all ages taking pictures. I did it too, amazed at how the city, with a reputation for being gray and tough, was reclaiming that group of fat young men who scandalized everyone in the late 60s and early 70s. Little did I imagine then that a few months later the band's singer, Ozzy Osbourne would die just a few weeks after giving his last concert at Villa Park, Aston Villa's home.

[In this article, we also call heavy metal metal, with an open accent, as recommended by Termcat, but we keep metal, without an accent, in stylistic denominations, such as black metal, death metal and thrash metal]