Messed!Up
The second day of the festival comes with the gigs on Eos and Gaia stages, and is a great opportunity for new bands to showcase their talent in front of fairly big audiences. Many bands have started their career at the Roskilde pre-festival and later climbed the ladder to become part of the ‘real’ festival line-up (which starts on Wednesday).
After the breakfast routine, including the daily chase for a Coffee Cow and listening to people filling in the gaps to recreate yesterday’s happenings, we were off to watch the promising Swedish shoegaze band Boy With Apple. The band released a great piece of work last year with their debut album, Attachment hit the record store shelves, and returned just a couple of days ago with a new single, “Feeble”, and after signing with brilliant Gothenburg record label Welfare Sounds & Records. Music-wise, it’s dreamy, reverb-drenched guitars and vocals, and pretty much straightforward shoegaze. Their performance follows very much of the shoegaze trajectory as we’re used to – stare at your shoes and not move too much. To be fair, this type of music only works out for me in the afternoon. I would fall asleep to this kind of music (and have done so before) after a few beers in the evening, but luckily this was a daytime gig when you’re still trying to shake off bad memories from yesterday by having your first dring (try the Yuzu Madness drink in the bar next to Gaia – great start to get back to normal again). I may have been a bit harsh in reviewing their previous gigs, but it’s all about the slot, and this was the perfect slot. Good start to the day and for getting the blood flowing through the legs again, relieving you from the pain from the first night in a tent in a year.
When you have been to the festival for more than three decades, there’s also lots of other camps you’ve learned to know over the years, friends you only meet once a year – at the Roskilde Festival. The rest of the second day was about walking around and meeting up with friends all over the campsite. This year, it actually meant walking across the whole campsite as people tend to spread out, and when I was back in my tent around 2 am, my smartwatch told me I’d walked about 19,000 steps or almost 14 kilometers. Who said festival life is unhealthy?
It’s also interesting to see how the festival developed over the years. In the first years I attended the festival at the beginning of the 90s, there was just one campsite. Today, there’s an East and West campsite where East is divided into thematic campsites – Silence & Clean, Settle n Share, Clean Out Louds, and many more. After a few hours camp-hopping, the night ended at Dream City, the festival’s own Little Las Vegas in terms of entertainment and DJ parties – a fully community-driven temporary city where creativity, sustainability, and communal living collide in vibrant ways. Massive sound systems (mobile club-sized sound systems) and epic parties. Just do your pick, and when you don’t want to dance to another version of “Boten Anna”, just pick the 80s party 20 meters to the left. Unlimited fun (with the usual consequences the next day – headache, sore limbs, and finding your lost items from the night). If day one was all about meeting up with your friends, day two was about getting the party started.
Tonight it’s time for Camp Vienna’s traditional Jam Session – see you there!
