Messed!Up
Roskilde Festival is the festival happening of the year for some of us. I find it hard to belive that this is the 30th time I’ve been at the festival – every year since 1992 save for the canceled pandemic years – but I now know why I never bought a house or a flat because here’s where I invested my money. And it’s a damn good investment – memories can never be swapped for an apartment you only spend hours in when sleeping.
A lot has changed since that first year, in 1992, when bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were the major headliners. Today, the festival is more electronically oriented and it has booked loads of hip hop acts this year, and I’ve heard many of those experienced festivalgoers whining about it quite much – “Roskilde Festival lost its soul”. I should be one of those because hip hop is as far off for me as traditional German folk music is, but for two reasons I won’t whine about: every festival with some sort of survival instinct has to adapt to what people want and the young generation wants hip hop. Just look at any chart out there and you will see that hip hop dominates. Secondly, Roskilde is way more than music. In fact, it’s the main reason I return year after year as the overall festival atmosphere is incomparable to anything you can experience in Europe, and I usually visit eight to ten festivals every year.
When you have been to a festival for such a long time, you know the drill from the start. Come early, check in, raise your tent, and have a powernap (yes, I’m always exhausted from traveling with a heavy bag and extra gear needed to do some work). Quite soon you forget about horrible traveling experiences – well, this year was the smoothest ever – and set off for the festival area to catch a glimpse of the opening. Nothing is as exciting as the opening when people rush in to get a good spot. But not this year.
The last few years the festival has started with thematic areas like Silent & Clean, Settle ‘n’ Share, Clean Out Loud and many more ‘camping districts’ which makes the festival a lot more organized than back in the days when the grand opening was like a scene from The Purge. This year they also started with different early bird tickets to avoid the long line at the opening. The downside of that is that there wasn’t any Purge run into the campsite this year, people had already booked a spot and walked slowly through the entrance. Gone are the days when the people tore down the fences five hours before the opening and The Purge started.
Most of my friend camps are also quite spread out over the festival area – Settle ‘n’ Share, Silent & Clean, and the Caravan Camp – and due to the distances between camps you have to decide from day one what camp to visit or you will end up with blisters everywhere. This year I’ve decided to put lots of focus on Camp Vienna United, a strange combination of Germans, a few Americans calling themselves the Wolfpack, some stray Swedens, Danes that don’t find their own camp and stay the whole festival, and no Austrians at all (it’s a long story, we’ll do a special about it later). If people want to meet up, they have to keep their eyes open for the huge Austrian flag with a Pride sign in the middle at Settle ‘n’ Share.
The first day is all about adjustment. You’ve been in your office share for a year and even if you’ve done the usual 250 gigs before the festival you can’t compare to actually staying at a festival, outdoors in a very dusty environment, for nine days. A personal problem has been that acclimatization always means having lots of beers on the first day. I promise myself every year to keep it cool, “This year I’ll do it differently and only drink water”, and while walking around shooting photos in the festival area I accidentally bought a 12-pack of Tuborg. Nothing is as good as a cold Tuborg when it’s 27 degrees hot. And the first night turned into a huge party meaning that Sunday wasn’t the sunshine day I was hoping to have. Didn’t someone really wise once said “There’s nothing new under the sun”. Well, I can confirm, it’s not. But it was a really fun first night, meeting up with friends I haven’t seen for a year or even longer, and that’s worth something, ey?
Sunday, although having to fight the demons from last night’s adventures in Tuborg land, was the day to experience food and campsites. There’s a huge range of food choices and compared to Primavera Sound in Barcelona, a way bigger festival that we covered three weeks ago, the choices are amazing. There’s a new food stall every 200 metres and you won’t have to walk more than a few minutes to get fed.
Being hung over had its advantages – you’re constantly hungry. Thus I made it through pork roast brunch, a Dixie burger for lunch and some Indian food in the evening, all high quality dishes worth its money. The prices aren’t higher than on any other festival; you’ll pay somewhere between 80 and 100 Danish krona and if you’re not a Swede (with the worst currency in Europe at the moment, the Swedes complained yesterday), it’s normal prices for any festival. The Dixie burger is a favorite and has been since they started about ten years ago (or whenever it was), above all they have an amazing veggie burger. This is where I’ll have my lunch most of the days.
The rest of the day was about taking part in raising the flag pole in Camp Vienna (meaning watching the young ones do it as the tradition is that they do it while the oldies have a beer), strolling down to Dream City where most of the action happens during the festival. However, at the moment it’s still very quiet and people haven’t arrived yet, but I expect the major parties to be in that ‘hole’ (it’s a former sandpit) of the festival area for the next few days.
Sunday was also the first they for the pre-festival shows and although I didn’t have anything interesting in my schedule I popped by to watch a few minutes of some shows – and as I thought, it wasn’t any interesting. Personally, Roskilde Festival doesn’t have their best line-up this year, maybe one of the worst based on my taste in music, but like I point out above, it’s more than music and that’s enough for me. I’m here for the Roskilde spirit, not necessarily the bands. but id wouldn’t hurt if Pearl Jam is on the line-up next year, just saying.
Time for a new of festival shenanigans without a hung-over.
