Since 1971, Roskilde Festival has attracted thousands of music lovers and party merchants for a unique music experience founded in love, good times, humanism … and a boat-load of drinking.
For this year, the premises were more than encouraging – for the first time since 2009, all the multi-day and single day tickets of Roskilde Festival had been sold out, despite the weather forecast incorrectly predicting a steady downpour throughout the festival. It did piss down at times and yes, it got muddy, but there was some respite too.
Going Orange
Over 8 days, some 130,000 visitors and 179 acts got in on the action, although cold numbers can only provide a fleeting glimpse of the indomitable event, the largest culture and music festival in Northern Europe. Once again, the festival confirmed itself to be a nonpareil experience. From the first four warm-up days to the full-time tune days, the whole festival was brimming with spectacular art concerts, activities, delicious food and drinks – everything for non-profit, within the authentic realm of that ‘orange feeling’.
Every year, Roskilde Festival focuses on topics that it deems worthy of particular attention, and this year’s thoughts were dedicated to equality and human rights, as well as digital monitoring, the right to privacy, freedom of expression and refugees.
Edward Snowden was invited to speak via satellite from his exile in Moscow, where he was forced to relocate to after revealing classified information about US global mass surveillance programs a few years ago.
From Neil to the ‘D’
The need for love, peace and tolerance worldwide has been a strong leitmotif of this year’s festival, and the guests selected for the opening of the Orange Stage represented that well. The Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic Music has been scattered all over the world following the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011. Their Roskilde concert was one of their first performances together since the conflict erupted, but you wouldn’t have guessed it – they were spectacular.
The festival also included a three-hour gig by the legend Neil Young, as well as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a mix of hip hop and rap by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, MØ, PJ Harvey, the rock-comedy group Tenacious D, Wiz Khalifa and it concluded on Sunday with Minds Of 99.
They say all good things must come to an end, indeed many were suffering hard from the bacchanal blues on Monday morning, and unfortunately, there’s just no other cure for it but to endure the long wait until Roskilde Festival 2017. See you there!
