Europe serves up a buffet of music festivals for our wallets to feast on each year and while the majority of us get stuck in the UK mud of Glastonbury and Reading, the continent’s mainland does offer alternatives for those who want music without all the muck.

With this in mind, 2007 saw 75 000 sun searchers flip flop to Denmark for the annual Roskilde “Orange feeling” festival. The rumors are true - this long running rock festival’s line-up is loaded with just as many big name bands as its British counterparts and its 37 year history has been bleached with sun just as much as much as the average Dane’s hair and skin.

Subsequently, the town of Roskilde provides such a perfect camping environment and the festival begins four days before the bands even arrive. The site becomes a hive of activities containing skate competitions, soccer matches and fire dancing displays - all between dips in the lake – before 2007.

While in 2006 the Brit and Aussie campers rehashed the Ashes series - the only people caught out in 2007 were those who decided not to pack the ‘wellies’. Instead of sunshine, the Nordic skies brought over 100mm of rain and destroyed any early camper’s dream of a suntan on camp.

While the pessimists piked and packed it in, the optimists charged their cans and celebrated that there couldn’t be a better time to drink warm beer. And although the feeling of walking through foot deep mud with garbage bags wrapped around your shoes is priceless - for gum boots, laundromats and everything else there’s the local town of Roskilde or the big top Arena stage to sleep under.

So instead of raining on Roskilde’s eight day parade, all the record rainfall proved was just how well-run the Roskilde festival has become. Amidst the thousands of pairs of mud filled boots squelching the walkways, the tanker trucks sucked out lakes, bulldozers cleared stage areas and dump truck after dump truck hauled in over 2500m3 of wood chips. A great service, yet a soggy pill to swallow for the organizers whose profits were washed away with a £500 000 bill to keep the conditions under control.

Unlike its surroundings, the vibe of the crowd refused to be dampened and the mosh pits took time out from flooding the Laundromats to saturate all of the festivals six main stages which served up enough courses of reggae, rap, dance, heavy metal and rock to satisfy anyone’s musical palette.

Two hundred official acts dotted the gaps from when the tattooed biceps of Danish rock band Volbeat opened the festivals main “Orange” stage on day four – to when a robust performance from Basement Jaxx closed it on day eight. And while all acts played like they didn’t sleep in a wet tent the night before, a few highlights deserve a larger mention.

The Who – “We’ve still got it” award

My parents were barely walking when these guys first took to the stage but I am guessing The Who probably jumped around just as much at Roskilde as they did back in 1964. While many bands of their era are lucky enough to be alive (let alone still playing) The Who has their act so well refined they are able to rev up a crowd with the same old tricks they’ve been using for the last 40 odd years.  Perhaps if the Beastie Boys played after them, the boys from Brooklyn would’ve rethought the new blues brothers look for their old white jumpsuits.

Flaming Lips – “Best Entrance” award

If the PR man for Danish brewing giant Carlsberg had been there he would have said that it was ‘probably the best stage show in the world’. The self proclaimed Borat look-alike inflated a giant plastic bubble around himself and rolled around the mosh pit before retaking the stage with a confetti gun and an entourage of aliens, super heros and Santas. Whether you are a Lips fan or not, it is clear to see why, after eight appearances, they are the most ‘Roskilde seasoned’ performers.

Red Hot Chilli Peppers – “Wet Cold Tent Pegs” award

While musically they were brilliant and endlessly talented, their much more chilled rather than red hot performance hinted that California’s most musical sons might be pumping their bodies with a lot more herbal tea than anything else these days. Wearing a lot more than just socks, it was almost cruel their encore included old high-energy favorite “Give it Away” leaving us all with a sole lonely reminder to just how much their style has changed. Don’t get me wrong, Flea was great on his newly acquired trumpet and his stuttered speech that eerily proclaimed “it great to see [our] faces, eyes ....noses…mouths…..and skin??” certainly made us all think. But it was probably a performance better saved for an audience not freezing, wet and fighting off hypothermia.

Tiësto – “Why did it have to clash with the RHCP” award

With six first class stages it was bound to happen, but thankfully Tiësto’s blue neon power desk in the Arena stage had much more juice in it than the amps back at the Orange stage. Tightening up any slack left by the Peppers, Tiësto spellbounded the Arena stage into a trance of velvet electronic ecstasy before sending us home in the twilight of 4am half dazed and wondering when he’ll next becoming to town closer to home. 

Even though the festival closed its curtains on Sunday, those who camped until Monday morning were blessed with the arrival of one last act everyone had come to see. Yes, you guessed it – the sun. Not a cloud in the sky made Monday a great day for overcrowded planes, trains and busses, but it all had been worth it. And while all of us were smiling, no one smiled harder than the hardworking orange volunteers who were grateful that their clean up responsibilities did not include the various airports and train stations of Copenhagen now caked in a colour quite a few shades darker than the orange.

The Origins of Orange

There is no question the orange brigade had gone beyond the call of duty to keep Roskilde’s reputation held high, however the one question that did stump them all was the association with the colour they all wore. The best answer I heard was “I have no idea it might as well be blue,” and the most logical answer was “when the festival went international the word orange was the most universal of all the native languages of the surrounding nations.” But the most interesting answer of all was that the main orange stage used to be the Rolling Stones’ touring stage was bought off them in the 70’s and is now re-assembled each year. “So what did the Rolling Stones have to do with the colour Orange” I ask. “Well that’s probably an even better question” I am told.