Roskilde Festival
is a festival held south of Roskilde in Denmark and is one of the largest music festivals in Europe (alongside with the Vieilles Charrues Festival, the Sziget Festival, the Glastonbury Festival, the Paléo Festival, Rock Werchter, and Exit Festival). Roskilde Festival is the largest festival in northernEurope. It was created in 1971 by two high school students, Mogens Sandfær and Jesper Switzer Møller, and promoter Carl Fischer.In 1972, the festival was taken over by the Roskilde Foundation, which has since run the festival as a non-profit organization for development and support of music, culture andhumanism. Toward the festival of 2014, the Roskilde Foundation has provided the participants of the festival with the opportunity, by votes and nominations, to influence which organizations should receive the profit of the festival.
It is Denmark’s first real music-oriented festival, originally for hippies but it has never been afraid to change and today covers more of the mainstream youth from Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. Roskilde Festival 2007 had more than 180 performing bands and gathered around 80,000 people paying for the concerts, with more than 21,000 volunteers, 5,000 media people and 3,000 artists – which means almost 110,000 people participated in the festival.
For many years it was a tradition that the campsite opened the last Sunday of June, but in 2010 the festival opened Saturday instead. The festival management argued that this would prevent earlier years problems with the fence going down before time. The festival officially starts the following Thursday and the days leading up to the officiel opening is called warm up days. One stage Pavillion is during the warm up days renamed Pavillion Junior and presents the festival guests to up-coming bands from Scandinavia.
The festival officially starts the following Thursday at the Animal Showgrounds (in recent years simply known as the “Festival Site”) and lasts for 4 days.
Every year since 1999, on the Saturday of the festival, Roskilde Festival Radio organizes a naked run around the camp site. One male and one female winner receives a ticket for the next year’s festival. In the past few years, the naked run has become so popular that the Festival Radio has been forced to arrange qualifier events for the male participants.
Homepage:
Roskilde Festival 2014 – 29 June to 6 July: Frontpage
Band-list 2014 (more bands will follow)
Roskilde Festival 2014 – 29 June to 6 July: Bands
