Wolfmother at the Kasematten: a rock show inside Graz's fortress ruins

Some venues are just rooms with a stage. The Kasematten in Graz is not one of them. On 11 August 2026 Wolfmother played there, in the shell of a fortress building on top of the Schlossberg, the wooded hill that rises straight out of the old town. The full Wolfmother gallery is online; this is the story of the place they played.

From fortress cellar to open-air stage

The Kasematten began life around 1578 as a building in the former moat of the Schlossberg fortress, with vaulted cellars used to store supplies. When the fortress became a state prison in 1783, those cellars held prisoners.

In 1809, after Napoleon's troops had taken Vienna, the fortress was razed. The people of Graz paid to save a few landmarks, including the Clock Tower and the Bell Tower that still define the skyline, but the building above the cellars was lost. What remained was a roofless stone shell.

That shell became a stage in 1937, opening with Beethoven's Fidelio. A movable roof followed in 1987, and since 2017 a glazed rear wall has helped shows go ahead when the weather turns. With room for around 1,700 people standing, it is small enough that the back row still feels close to the band.

Why Wolfmother suit the place

Wolfmother came out of Sydney in the mid-2000s with a sound that owes plenty to the heavy rock of the early 1970s. Their self-titled debut, released in 2005, gave them "Woman", "Joker & the Thief" and "Dimension", and "Woman" won a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. Singer and guitarist Andrew Stockdale is the one constant in a line-up that has changed many times since.

The 2026 tour marked twenty years of that debut, and a band built on big riffs and bigger hair makes sense between walls that have stood for more than four centuries.

Photographing a show under the open sky

Open-air venues change the job. In August the evening light lingers, so the opening songs are often lit as much by the sky as by the rig, and the look of the photographs shifts from one song to the next as the daylight goes. Stone walls also behave differently from a black-box club: they catch the stage light and give the background texture instead of empty darkness.

The trick is to work with that rather than against it. Wider frames that show the walls tell you where the show happened; tight frames on Stockdale and the guitar say what it felt like. The gallery mixes both.

Getting to the Kasematten

The stage sits near the top of the Schlossberg. You can walk up the stone steps from Schlossbergplatz, ride the Schlossbergbahn funicular, or take the lift cut into the rock. If you go to a show there, leave time for the climb and for the view over the red roofs of Graz before the band comes on.

See the full Wolfmother gallery from the Kasematten, or browse all concert galleries.