Roskilde 1998

introduction

This year, I decided to attend the rock festival in Roskilde, Denmark. While music isn't one of my biggest interests, I thought camping in the mud with 79999 other people sounded like a fun idea.

I went there with a bunch of friends; Madeleine, Anna, Jens, Alice, Sten, Pär - and Sofia, whom I didn't know, but who was a friend of Madeleine's.

housing

We brought seven tents; the plan was for everybody to sleep in a huge yellow 10-person tent unless it rained much; in that case we'd migrate to the smaller, more water-tight ones.

Some people we knew arrived on Wednesday and Thursday; two of them, Magnus "Gassa" Gasslander and another Martin, who went under the nickname "Nanook", ended up sleeping in our big tent; some of the others - Markus and Graciela, Johan and Lisa, Magnus and Victoria, among others - slept in the smaller tents.

The weather turned out to be rather good all week, so we stayed in the 10-person tent and didn't have to evict anybody.

accessories

As party clothes, I decided to bring a light-colored suit and a red Santa Claus cap, because I thought there'd be a lot of unkempt people there so I wanted to make a fashion statement. Or perhaps it's just my exhibitionist tendencies; I seem to recall trying to figure out an attire which no-one else at Roskilde would wear.

Instead of a camera, which someone might steal, I brought a sketchbook, lots of pencils, but no erasers, which resulted in a number of scratchy sketches which can be viewed using the menu on the left. Later, I got to scan some of Sofia's photos, which are now scattered throughout this travelogue.

Another thing I brought was a lot of stupid flyers; I'd read on another homepage about "Beware of the wolverines" flyers which someone handed out last year, and I wanted to do something similarily silly.

ROSKILDE DIARY

tuesday: solo boxes

The festival didn't start until Thursday, but we left as early as 2 pm on Tuesday to make sure we'd find good spots to place our tents.

In Helsingborg, we ate at an Indian/Pakistani restaurant, which was to be the first in a row of restaurants which didn't give us enough cutlery or water to drink. The neighboring porn shop led Sten to talk about "solo boxes" which apparently were all the rage in porn clubs in Uddevalla and other small Swedish towns.

They became a standing joke, and whenever someone got tiresome, people would yell "Put him in the solo box!"

Anyway, we reached Roskilde, found a place for our car, and everyone got the wristbands which allowed you entry into the festival area except Pär, who had this special backstage-pass-VIP ticket and had to find another place to enter.

After some confused arguments with our perpetually drunk Danish neighbors, and after surreptitiously moving other people's tents around, we succeeded in making place for our big tent, pitching the others in the vicinity.

wednesday: modern art

With one day to go before the festival started, we decided to go to the Louisiana museum of modern art. Some highlights, in my opinion, were the Danish artist Carl-Henning Pedersen (some of his drawings in his series Fantasiens Fugle were really cute), a room which played a horizontally symmetrical under-water movie to a weird rendition of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game, and a video screen which showed a weird domino tile-type show; a pin punctures a water-filled balloon that is attached to a candle that, as the water pours out, lights a bucket of inflammable fluid that incinerates a cord that holds a weight which drops onto a barrel that rolls down some stairs into...etcetera. You get the idea.

The weather was perfect and we ended up bathing on the beach outside the museum.

In the evening we barbecued on the festival area. It was pretty chilly, so I put on my cap and suit, which were some of the warmest clothes I'd brought. I started to feel a cold coming on; to get warmer, I decided to walk around the perimeter and see what the place looked like.

I heard someone remark to his friend that he'd seen many people in Santa Claus caps this year. I took it as a sign that I was, if not original, then at least trendy and hip.

thursday: keine roboter

I woke up feeling well again; no trace of a cold.

We drove into Roskilde and went bathing in the village's swimming hall because we'd heard that they would fill the hall with bathing toys during the festival. It was fun. We spent a lot of time trying to fit impossibly many people onto small foam rubber mattresses, laughing when we failed, and singing Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" because it seemed fitting when floating around on fragile vessels with feelings of impending doom.

Pär got a pretty serious headache; apparently, he saw stripes and stars and Jens got blamed because he had swimwear and towels with the US flag on.

Back on the festival area I walked around and noticed a playground-type thing and played there for a while. Almost next to it, on the lawn, was a boat. It said in the festival programme that last year, the lawn was flooded with rain, so this year they decided to put a boat there for additional safety.

I watched Tori Amos's three first songs; then I went to watch Kraftwerk and later returned to the red stage to watch Tricky. My only regret was that I didn't stay long enough at the crowded Kraftwerk concert to see their robots, which I was later told they'd brought.

I thought both Tori and Kraftwerk were pretty good, but unfortunately I didn't have a good view of the stage on any of the concerts.

friday: "no offense, but it shows"

One of the activites on the festival area was painting, so I stopped by and painted a couple of faces on the designated wall. An hour later, people had already covered all my paintings with other paintings and graffiti. Sigh. People don't appreciate good art anymore.

Later, I went and played volleyball. There was an asphalted area next to the volleyball ground where people were doing aerobics. Suddenly, people started clapping hands; I turned my head and noticed that one of the people doing aerobics was a naked man who jumped around frantically for half a minute and then disappeared into the cheering crowd.

After an hour and a half of volleyball I decided that my skin had gotten red and itchy enough from the sun and went to search for some sunblock.

I watched Sonic Youth and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Later on, we were supposed to meet at the Rum & Cigar bar, but I got there too late and spent the rest of the day on my own because I couldn't find the others. As it turned out, only a few people had gotten there on time, so I wasn't alone in having a bad sense of time.

I listened to Garbage, Pizzicato Five (who were surprisingly fun) and Weeping Willows. Wearing my cap, I got photographed with a girl as Santa Claus.

At the playground, I talked a while with a girl named Linnea; I remarked that it was the first time I went to a rock festival. She looked at what I was wearing - a light-colored suit - and said "no offense, but it shows".

It was a fun day. No big disasters. A negligible amount of people puked in our tent and almost none of us took any drugs.

saturday: benen i kors

We bathed, once again, at the Roskilde swimming hall. We discovered that Pär's bracelet didn't stand The Cure, so we sang to it. Don't ask. Most of us ate a taco buffet at a weird restaurant. There was a stand-up-comedian-type guy performing on the square outside, playing loud music, and suddenly the restaurant owners felt it necessary to compete and turned up the music in the restaurant to deafening levels. This went on until the stand-up guy walked into the restaurant and told them to cut it out. They obliged. A strange people, the Danish.

On my way home, I walked by the appliance store Superkram to buy a plastic bag; "kram" means hug in Swedish, and you simply have to have something from a store whose name is "super hug".

Back at the festival area I dubbed Gassa my personal hair stylist and he did his best to give me spiky hair, but since it was so short the intended spikes became, to use a Swedish hairdressing term, "nubbs".

I went to watch Sorten Muld, a Danish ambient techno band, but had to leave because I didn't feel very well again; my body couldn't decide if I should be freezing or sweating so it let different body temperatures take turns every five minutes.

It was probably the sauna; I know from experience that sudden changes in temperature often mess up my immune defence. I had planned on watching Pulp (where we were also supposed to meet and barbecue), Beastie Boys, Sisters of Mercy and Rammstein but I spent the rest of the day in the intensely yellow tent, inside my sleeping bag with my clothes on, trying to get warm and feeling pathetic.

Then Sofia and Madeleine dropped by with Alvedon (an antipyretic) and dragged me away to watch Lisa Ekdahl, which turned out to be the greatest musical experience I had at Roskilde. I went back to bed humming her song Benen I Kors.

sunday: blurry

I woke up and it was raining and I felt really ill. Everything inside the tent looked nauseatingly yellow, I was freezing and just to make us happy, someone had written "CMS" on the tent with a felt-tip pen.

The rest of the day, the weather alternated between lots of sun and cold thunderstorms. It switched every fifteen minutes, and no-one could figure out what they were supposed to wear.

I lay in the tent, drew a little, and listened to Kent who played far away at the red stage, but who were still clearly audible from our tent.

Markus dropped by and I persuaded him to distribute some of the flyers we'd made but that we for various reasons hadn't handed out yet. Later, I went out and handed some out myself.

I didn't want to wear contact lenses (because I had a cold), and I didn't have a good alternative, so I spent the whole day walking around in a blur. I bought a sandwich for lunch, which I managed to buy for less than the listed price - mainly because my vision was so blurry I couldn't find out what the listed price was; I handed the woman behind the counter a couple of coins, and I looked so confused that she found it easier to just give me my sandwich than to explain to me what the real price was.

In the afternoon, I started to feel slightly better, so I walked all the way to the green stage and listened to some fuzzy blobs of light that people told me were Primal Scream and Portishead.

At 10.30 we started to drive home. We had to wait one hour for the ferry over Öresund; I spent it discussing comics with Sofia. I got home at 4.30 am, unpacked the things which desperately needed unpacking (wet towels, smelly clothes), was surprised to find that my fishes and plants were still alive, took a shower and went to sleep.

LIKES AND DISLIKES

what I liked

I loved the weather - until it started to rain. I loved playing volleyball, bathing, eating watermelon for breakfast, listening to Lisa Ekdahl and discovering Carl-Henning Pedersen. I liked exploring the festival area and generally doing something I hadn't done before.

other highlights

The toilets were much cleaner than I had expected, and there were more activities (besides the music). And I got much more sleep than I'd thought I'd get. Earplugs are a wonderful invention.

what I didn't like

I disliked being ill. I hadn't had a cold in nearly a year, so the timing was lousy.

I quite enjoyed taking ice cold showers in the morning and the rest of the joys of festival life, except the abundant cigarette smoke, which really annoyed me. Very few people I know smoke, and smoking, for me, is roughly "something stupid that people used to do once upon a time when they didn't know any better", so when I have to spend some time in a nicotine cloud I start to wonder "Hey! Why are they smoking those smelly things? Didn't they go out of fashion a long time ago?"

NICE PEOPLE

I'd like to thank everyone who drove the 850 kms; I don't have a driver's license, so I felt like a bit of a leech. Also, I would like to send special thank-yous to Sofia and Madeleine for caring and generally being wonderful people, and to Pär for sympathy and Tyrkisk Peber.

Martin, signing out.