Have Metal, Will Travel: Runar Pettersen and the Map of Metal
Sep 29, 2026 ·
Three decades of festivals, pubs and graveside detours have turned one Norwegian Iron Maiden fan into the metal world's most obsessive travel agent. We talked to Metal Travels founder Runar Pettersen about tracking down album-cover locations, dodging fake "metal bars" and the one Motörhead pilgrimage we both still owe ourselves.
Some people plan holidays around beaches. Runar Pettersen plans them around Metal concerts, history and fandom. The Oslo-based writer, festival press manager and lifelong Iron Maiden devotee runs Metal Travels, a free online guide to every metal-related place he can find on Earth. That means pubs and venues, but also graves, museums, recording studios, band homes, album-cover backdrops and music-video shoot locations.
The site now lists more than 1,000 destinations in dozens of countries, from Japan and Mongolia to Chile and Costa Rica. Over a run of emails, it became clear that Runar and Fermented Metal share a lot of DNA: the same favourite band, the same conviction that the show is only half the trip, and, as it turns out, the same unfinished business in a small town in Staffordshire.
Thirty years of field research
Metal Travels didn't begin as a business plan. It began as a backlog. "I've been travelling to festivals and visiting metal pubs and other metal-related places for about thirty years," Runar says. Once phone cameras got good enough, the photos piled up too. "So with both the knowledge and the photos to build a site like Metal Travels, it felt like a good idea."
There was also a hole to fill. For years, the go-to resource was the Metal Travel Guide, a crowd-sourced directory of rock and metal bars started in 2002 by Hamburg fan Britta Hackenberger. By 2005 it already listed roughly 1,300 locations in 80 countries. Runar used it heavily and, by his recollection, it went dark around 2016. "I definitely missed having something like that," he says.
He didn't want a straight replacement, though. From the start, the goal was to push past bars and record shops into the stranger corners of metal history.
How a place earns its pin
Most of the listings come from Runar's own digging, though reader submissions are rising as the site grows. Big-name bars are easy to find. Small venues are another story, and that's where locals matter: "local metal fans obviously know their own scenes much better."
Verification is unglamorous but relentless. "Google Maps is probably my best friend for that," he says. In Europe and North America, listings update quickly, so he checks recent reviews, walks the block on Street View, and looks at whether the venue is still posting on social media. A bar that went quiet online six months ago is a red flag.
The bigger discipline is saying no. The one hard rule is a real connection to metal or hard rock. Beyond that, Runar tries to think past his own tastes: if something fascinates him, other fans probably care too, but the site isn't only for him. What he won't do is pad the map.
"There are quite a few websites out there where something is described as a metal pub when, in reality, it isn't a metal pub at all. I want to avoid that, because otherwise you just end up sending people to the wrong places."
Anyone who has trekked across a strange city to find a "rock bar" playing chart pop will understand why that matters.
The detective work
The part of Metal Travels Runar loves most is also the hardest: album-cover backdrops, music-video sets, graves and former homes. "I really enjoy finding out where an album cover photo was taken, where a music video was filmed, or where certain events in metal history happened," he says. It takes far more work than logging a festival, so it grows slowly.
A tree, not a headstone. Original Iron Maiden drummer Clive Burr died in March 2013 after years with multiple sclerosis. He was cremated, and his memorial is a tree with a small plaque; Find a Grave records him at the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium. Finding the cemetery was easy. Finding the plaque, roughly 10 cm by 5 cm, meant searching for quite a while.
Madness in Monmouthshire. Maiden's 1988 video for "Can I Play with Madness" was directed by Julian Doyle and starred Monty Python's Graham Chapman as a grumpy art teacher. It was filmed at Tintern Abbey and Chislehurst Caves, one of Chapman's last TV appearances before his death in 1989. Runar squeezed Tintern in between Maiden shows in Birmingham and London: Birmingham to Chepstow, on to the abbey in the Wye Valley, then across to London. "As a Norwegian I had to figure out all the connections myself," he says. "But it was worth it."
A brewery in Brazil. In May 2026, Bruce Dickinson released an orchestral video for a reworked "Tears of the Dragon," from More Balls to Picasso. Press coverage said only that it was shot in a disused São Paulo brewery in September 2025, after Bruce played The Town festival. Pinning down which brewery took Runar "quite a lot of searching," comparing frames from the video against possible sites until one matched. That is the kind of entry you won't find on a generic travel app.
Bars that go further
Posters on the wall and a metal playlist don't impress Runar much. The bars he rates are the ones that commit to a world of their own. Three stood out.
Bar | Where | Why it earns the trip |
168 Marcy Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC | Jimmy Duff's bar (born as Bellevue in Hell's Kitchen in 1999, in Brooklyn since 2004) is covered floor to ceiling in memorabilia. Runar calls the collection "insane." | |
177 Mare St, Hackney, East London | A self-styled occult rock bar open since 2018. Runar says the artwork makes it feel "almost like a Hammer horror film from the 1960s." | |
29–35 Niddry St, Old Town, Edinburgh | Built into vaults under the Old Town, with seven rooms, three bars and a 50-seat cinema. It bills itself as Scotland's most haunted pub. |
A bonus for Maiden fans: CAMRA lists Robinsons' Trooper among the Banshee's regular beers. "I love places like that," Runar says, "places that are unique and don't really look like anywhere else." I totally agree.
Following the Beast
How much does metal decide where Runar goes? "It's actually one hundred per cent," he says, trips inside Norway aside. The engine is Iron Maiden, his favourite band, who tour almost every year. "I want to see them as often as possible before they eventually stop touring."
That has taken him to Maiden shows in Japan, the United States, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Slovakia, Belgium, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and more. Every city becomes a chance to tick off local metal landmarks, and the ones just out of reach, like Tintern, sometimes earn a dedicated detour. Festivals fill in the rest of the calendar.
This is where our stories converge. Iron Maiden were the spark for Fermented Metal, and anyone who follows them knows the gig is only the centrepiece of the trip. Runar agrees completely: "When you travel around to see Iron Maiden, you end up meeting many of the same people all over the world."
This summer he was at EddFest, the band's 50th-anniversary weekend at Knebworth Park on 10–11 July 2026. He considered carrying on to Burslem afterwards but was flying home to Norway from Edinburgh a few days later, so it was too big a detour. It was nearly identical to my own England metal tour earlier this year: Burslem was the one stop that wouldn't fit.
One pilgrimage, and the ones still waiting
Ask Runar to pick a single metal pilgrimage and he'll tell you it depends on your taste. By his own taste, it's London: Iron Maiden's home turf, the cradle of the NWOBHM, and still packed with metal pubs and gigs. For black metal fans, the answer is Oslo, with its dense history in and around the city and a busy live calendar.
He offers a statistic worth savouring: New York is about 11.6 times the size of Oslo, yet by his count Oslo has twice as many metal pubs. The population ratio checks out, give or take; the pub tally is Runar's own, from the Metal Travels site.
Top of his own list is Old No. 6 in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, where Lemmy Kilmister was born. The bar and mini-museum, created by IFK Legacy CIC, opened on 1 May 2026 on Market Place, pouring official Motörhead beers beside band memorabilia. It sits near Andy Edwards' bronze Lemmy statue, unveiled on 9 May 2025, and proceeds back plans to turn the Queen's Theatre into a 1,500-capacity venue called Kilmister Halls.
The other is Chislehurst Caves in Bromley, south-east London, the underground half of "Can I Play with Madness." Runar has meant to go for years, but it's always just far enough out of central London to get squeezed off the schedule.
Blank spots on the map
The gaps Runar most wants filled are South America and East Asia. Both have enormous metal audiences, but venues there tend to lean less on Google Maps and social media, which makes them hard to find and verify from afar. The other gap is sneakier: sun-and-sand holiday spots. Islands and coasts in Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Portugal are full of rock and metal pubs aimed at tourists, yet many barely promote themselves online. The site's recent update log bears this out, with Greek additions like Slash Bar, Helios Rock Bar and Pirates Rock Bar in 2026.
If you know a spot in any of those regions, Runar wants to hear about it. You can submit a destination on Metal Travels, post in the site's forum or contact him directly.
The day jobs: Scream and Inferno Fest
Runar's radar for new metal landmarks comes partly from his other two roles. He started helping with the website of Scream Magazine, Norway's metal magazine founded by Frode Øien in 1990, around 2000. The invitation came from Asgeir Mickelson, then drumming in Spiral Architect and designing for the magazine. A year later Runar became live editor, "mainly because I was already going to a lot of concerts and festivals, and somehow I just got stuck there." He's proud that Scream still prints a physical magazine today.
Since 2012 he has been press manager at Inferno Metal Festival, the Easter extreme-metal festival held in Oslo since 2001. This year's edition ran 2–5 April at Rockefeller and John Dee, with Mayhem, Deicide, Enslaved and Cult of Luna headlining.
Alongside it runs the Inferno Music Conference, first held in 2006 and billed as the world's largest metal conference; in 2024 it drew nearly 300 delegates from 36 countries. Runar's festival duties limit how much he sees himself, but his advice to metal journalists is unambiguous. "I would absolutely recommend it to journalists who want to make contacts within the industry," he says, citing labels, promoters, musicians, talks and clinics. The 2026 programme included a Mayhem guitar clinic with Teloch and Ghul.
Last call
What struck me most across these emails is that Runar treats a map the way a good magazine treats a story. Every listing is checked, every claim has a source, and anything that isn't really metal stays off the page. That discipline is why a pin on Metal Travels means something.
It's also a reminder of why so many of us travel for this music in the first place. The show is the anchor, but the trip is the ritual: the bar full of memorabilia, the abbey from a thirty-eight-year-old music video, the tiny plaque under a tree, and the familiar faces you keep bumping into from Oslo to Yokohama.
Runar and I are still one stop short of the same finish line. Old No. 6 in Burslem is waiting for both of us, and I suspect whoever gets there first will be sending the other a photo from the bar. Until then, if your city has a metal landmark missing from the map, tell him. And if you're planning your next trip, start at Metal Travels and let the Metal guide you.
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