Roskilde 2007?

Thank you Roskilde Festival, I left you behind 3 days ago and I can't get you out of my head. I had a great time, wallowing around in your smelly mud, wizzing back and forth between your Pavillion and Odeon stages like a muddy-back-and-forth-wizzing-thing. The smaller stages were a non stop smörgåsbord of inspiring new artists like Camera Obscura, The Thermals, Bondo Do Role, Tunng, CSS, and the wonderfull Grizzly Bear who's harmonies left me gob-smacked last Saturday night. I even saw Roky Erickson, my favourite mad 60's legend singing about zombies and a two headed dog. Thats the sort of thing that makes me keep coming back to you Roskilde Festival:
- a aging hero, you'd given up hope of ever seeing live, appears at Roskilde as rocking and vital as ever!
- a new band you've never heard before, catches your attention, drags you in and knocks you out completely!

But there is ONE thing thats been bugging me...

Whats going on at the 2 main stages, Orange and Arena? This year all the new exciting stuff was on the smaller stages, and with a just few exceptions, the headliners didn't seem worth the effort... just a load of old hat.

In days gone by there where 2 choices for a Danish rock fan:
a) Go to Roskilde Festival - where you could hear all the new cutting edge stuff, from a wide variety of genres but with the emphasis on contemporary rock, creative stuff, music to wake you up and make you think.
or
b) Go to Ringe Festival - where you could go and see a lot of the stuff that had been at Roskilde a few years previously, lost it's edge and ended up on prime time radio. Hit sounds to slow you down and make you drink.

Ringe Festival died miserably in 2004; their beery cocktail of old favorites and commercial pop had somehow lost it's taste and audience somwhere between the Tuborg Green Concerts and Ibiza holidays. But now for some strange reason Roskilde seems to have decided to pick up the torch and become a little bit more Ringe. To illustrate what I mean by that, I suggest that you check out a couple of old Roskilde posters using the timeline on the official Roskilde website. Every poster is like time capsule, you can just skim the headliners, and get a rough idea of what was happening musically that year, it's fun, it's memory lane. Then take at good look at the Roskilde poster for 2007, the one thats supposed to give us a rough idea of the current music scene...

Well right at the top of the list we've got Björk, The Beastie (good old) Boys and The (not quite so) Red Hot (anymore) Chilli Peppers; all 3 of them could all have headlined, back in the early 90's, and probably did. I know many people would argue that Björk is as relevant today as she ever was, but even so, if you put her next to the other names she just becomes a part of a stale old-guard, who cost a bomb and won't go away. Who else is there: there's the Queens of the Stoneage, a feisty rock outfit from 1998 who last played Roskilde in 2003, and there's the Roskilde debute of rock legends The Who of 60s/70s fame and in need of no introduction. But of course it's great that young music fans can get a chance to see a bit of still-going-strong rock history like the Who, or hardworking bands like the Queens who keep on trying to reinvent rock'n'roll, but put all these headliners together and a pattern of rather dull speculative thinking begins to emerge, no chances are being taken, it's all about "bums on seats", or in this case "boots in field". Anyway, if you ignore these old evergreen types, the top names we're left with to represent the rock music scene anno 2007 is an aging Dutch Ibiza star DJ Tiësto who doesn't really count, and Roskilde Festivals MOST CONTEMPORARY NAME... REPRESENTING THE YEAR 2007...drrrrrrrrdrum roll.......it's MUSE! (I won't bother you with what I think of Muse). Add standard MTV dross like those hasbeens The Basement Jaxx and wimpy wouldbe 80's revivalists The Killers and it makes you wonder who's running the show.

There are obviously some pretty keen talents involved in booking the rest of the festival, so who gets to book the main stage. Do the festival accountants spend a week listening to FM radio and then book anything that makes them whistle. Or is it a boardroom full of ageing hippys with cigars who's knowledge of contemporary music stems from asking the wife what shes been listening to in the car lately before going to the meeting.

"But who would you put on instead" I hear you ask, well look through this years NOT APPEARING list (or last year's), there are several big names who would fit the bill... probably.
I'll look into it...
I'll get back to it...
Watch this space... but right now, I'm off to bed, I'm not as young as I used to be!