Not being total debutants of Roskilde Festival anymore, we were really looking forward to repeat the experience of last year at the 2015-edition of Denmark’s biggest festival, that took place between 27. June and 4. July.
While there still were rain drops hanging on the first beer can opened on site, the grey clouds soon gave way for sunshine and heat far from the typical Danish summer. A good foundation for our second year at Roskilde! While one could write a post triple as long as this about the festival’s crazy week of music and culture, we decided to stick to only very few of our personal highlights below:
After getting to know about its exciting changes, we were especially keen on checking out the brand-new Roskilde Rising area, that featured a re-located stage and a full program of events under the motto “youth with purpose”. We were not the only ones agreeing on the fact, that it was the additional gimmicks and the effort on details, which last year’s boring Rising stage clearly had lacked.
So, the first concert experience of Roskilde Festival 2015 was dedicated to Odense originals TÅRN, who opened the new pyramid-shaped Rising stage, being the first – but definitely not last in this week – asking “Hva’ så Roskilde?” (= “What’s up Roskilde?”). With their easy guitar pop and Danish lyrics about love and other nice things, TÅRN’s music fit quite perfectly to the early afternoon atmosphere they played in. It was light, it was cozy, the mood still high and the beer still cold. A good start!
Next up on the Rising stage was hyped project Wangel that centers around singer Peter Wangel and producer Kasper Ejlerskov Leonhardt. Besides its core members the live-setup featured a drummer and, for the special occasion, even a horn section. Peter Wangel’s vocals that flourish between trembling falsetto and deep baritone, are definitely one earmark of the project’s melancholic electro tunes – and served as distinctive quality at their Roskilde concert as well.
After a nice kick-off at Roskilde Rising, it was on this year’s amazing Apollo stage where the next highlight of the day – or rather night – awaited. AV AV AV, the fruitful threesome of producers ELOQ, Unkwon and DJ E.D.D.E.H, made the stage literally shine in the darkness and their electronic sounds let noBODY in the huge crowd unmoved. The DJ collective did exactly what we had expected of them: they fired off a damn great party!
Another act who definitely knows how to throw a party is disco-pop group October Dance! Suiting to their breezy summery funk tunes, the guys – all uniformly dressed in white – hosted a hotsy-totsy beach party, with golden palm trees adorning the edge of Apollo stage. The literal cherry on top of their great appearance were a whole bunch of red-white striped beach balls popping up over the heads of the audience during the show’s finale, making beach vibes inevitable.
Late Monday evening, we then went back to the Rising stage to catch a glimpse of the highly anticipated show of noise/romance group The Entrepreneurs. From start till finish the three guys managed to give everyone in the audience a great kick in the balls! The concert was a burst of E-N-E-R-G-Y with capital letters, gilded by the band’s brilliant songs and the amazing vocals of lead singer Mathias Bertelsen.
Our Friday night during the main festival days was blocked for the late show at Orange Stage of indie veterans Mew. Orange Stage has probably never sounded better and Mew played a fantastic show, spreading their tunes: opening up with new songs such as “Satellites”, but also finding room for classics such as “Special”, “The Zookeeper’s Boy” and “Apocalypso”, it all ended with the beautiful “Comforting Sounds” – a true manifesto of Mew as one of the best Danish indie bands of all time.
The whole Roskilde Festival-experience somehow really feels like a hangover: it not only makes you incredibly tired (of people), sleeping in tents on semi-tight air mattresses also makes you think you’re the oldest person alive, and even though one might swear to never do it again, you most likely end up coming back to it over and over again!
We could’ve only guessed it last year, but now after the second round, we actually know for sure: this festival awakes something in you that makes you want to join year after year. So, if you’ll have us again, Roskilde Festival, we’ll be back!
Photos by Jasmin König
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