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Roskilde Rock Festival
The south of Roskilde in Denmark witnesses the Roskilde Festival. It is one of the two biggest annual rock music festivals in Europe, the other being the Glastonbury festival. It owes its origins to a couple of high school students, Mogens Sandfær and Jesper Switzer Møller, and the promoter Carl Fischer-who created it in 1971. In 1973, the festival was taken over by the Roskilde Foundation and since then it has been run as a non-profit organization by the foundation. The Roskilde rock festival now stands for development and support of music, culture and humanism the remarkably harmonizing qualities that have won it fans round the globe.
Rocking the world! A preview of Roskilde
The festival was Denmark's first real music oriented celebration. Originally meant for hippies, this festival has now taken a new form. Its present form covers more of the mainstream youth from Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. Roskilde Festival 2006 had a line-up of more than 170 performing bands and a 79,000-strong crowd of people paying for the concerts; the volunteers at the rock fest spanned over 21,000 in number and 5,000 media people covering the festivities done to life by 3,000 artists: a grand total of almost 110,000 people participating in the festival. The campsite for the venue of the Roskilde Rock Festival traditionally opens on the last Sunday of June. This gives the festival guests enough time to organize themselves for the festival which officially starts the following Thursday at the Animal Showground’s and it lasts for 4 days.
Interesting facts and music-bytes about Roskilde rock festival: Camping society
The Camping society occupies an important part of the Roskilde rock festival and is the venue where visitors can put tents and tickets to camp out on. The Roskilde Festival has a clearly demarcated festival site. The music and most of the stalls also occupy this place. The festival's camping area is located around “agoras”, this is also known as towers and are spots where people can cook, party and meet each other. Each agora has a special theme that contributes to the festival life with offers ranging from dating services to swimming lakes and radio broadcasting.
Baring the Roskilde rock festival mood: The naked race
For the last 8 years, a famous tradition has emerged at the Roskilde rock festival-that of having a naked race. Saturday is the day of the race that features approximately 20 runners, 50/50 of both genders. The winner is the first who runs 3 laps around the radio building in his/her birthday suit. The first prize is a ticket to the next year's festival. In 2006, there were over 10,000 spectators at the race.
Music mania: types and grooves
The music covers various styles like Heavy metal, Hip Hop, Electronic and Rock and efforts are on to promote new artists with the foundation having setup for a special stage for alternative music. Usually, the first day festivities are kicked-off by the latest Danish band and they open the Orange Stage. The oldies are not forgotten at all: at least one performance of classical music happens for sure.