Athens66

So it’s the second day at Roskilde festival (Friday) and after a good night sleep to get our energy back from yesterday’s trip we set out in the morning exploring the camp area. Roskilde is huge, with 14 camping areas scattered across the land. We visited a number of them in the morning, mostly around the lake area where people were taking advantage of the great weather this year. Needless to say, another party was taking place around the lake with music, people drinking, sunbathing, swimming (well mostly jumping in the water since swimming was only allowed in a small part of the lake) and having a real good time in general.
After this morning walkabout, we decided to head over to the Odeon stage for Kate Nash. I must say, I’ve never been in a live act with so many teenage girls (“heaven” as BLR quoted it!!). Of’ course, ten minutes later we left the scene since Kate’s performance (and songs) are mostly addressing the younger audience and we simply couldn’t stand any more of it (despite the many under-aged temptations). So it was back to our tent for some more rest in order to make the rest of the program in one go. Unfortunately, there was a really cool breeze (despite the endless sunshine) which made it all too difficult to wake up in time for Band of Horses (and Gnarls Barkley for BLR). Even more unfortunately (as it turned out), I did manage to wake up in time for Gnarls Barkley. The act wasn’t that bad; he was trying his best to get the crowd going but being at 17:00 in the afternoon, most people were still not up to it. The really bad thing about the act was actually leaving it, cause I had a small accident (too much gin and beer might have had something with it) and while I managed not to trip over and fall (on some stupid hidden step…or something like that), I did sprain my ankle quite bad (hurt like hell…thank god the alcohol took some of the pain away!).
An hour later (and with my ankle now double in size), we were back at the Orange stage for Kings of Leon. While I had heard quite negative remarks about their live performances in the past, they weren’t bad at all. The guys gave a classic rock performance, but nevertheless (since we ain’t that big fans of them) we left half an hour later in order to get some good spots on the Arena stage for our dose of Scottish rock, Mogwai. Guitars, drums, no lyrics and lots of moody atmosphere made our ears hurt from pure musical pleasure (although we couldn’t hear a thing afterwards for 20 minutes). The gals from Glasgow are way louder on stage than I had expected (in a positive sense) and while their music will never be able to make them a super-group, they really woke as up and opened our appetite for more acts during the rest of the day.

It was then back to the Orange stage for a glimpse of Nick Cave’s Grinderman. I’ll be honest; I’ve never seen Cave on stage before (although he is giving a couple of concert here in Greece almost every year), so it was quite interesting (for a while). Cave and the rest of the gang certainly know how to give a solid performance, but their music wasn’t that impressive for me (as opposed to Cave’s last album with the Bad Seeds which was marvelous). Then again, my mind was set on the next act in the Pavilion stage half an hour later. So we rushed (lipped) to the next stage for Holy Fuck.
I’ve read so many great reviews about their live acts from fellow bloggers that I knew I couldn’t afford to miss them. And thank god I didn’t. They are absolutely incredible on stage, with so much passion and energy that they made the whole crowd go crazy at every track. The two keyboardists play head-to-head while the other two members are just inches away, giving a feeling of a gang that doesn’t care about anything else other than making the crowd have a great time and creating amazing music. This one was one of the best acts on Roskilde for me.
The day ended with us running towards the last act on the Odeon stage, in order to get up close for my favorite band of the festival, Battles. The guys from New York had produced one of the best albums of 2007 for me and their music is just made for live performances. Thankfully for me, they didn’t disappoint us. Battles is one of those bands that produce music not intended for most people (no simple tunes or lyrics) and you either get into their sound or hate them. On stage, you can feel how much they love what their doing and it’s obvious that beyond everything, they’re in it for just their music. I’m sure I’m too judgmental to give a proper review of their performance, so I’ll just say this may have been the best moment for me in the festival. The only down side was that much of their music wasn’t live actually (samples and loops flying around all the time), but I guess it’s really impossible to recreate their studio sound on stage with only 4 members.

The other downside of the Battles concert was that it ended with Atlas, which meant everyone went bizzerk and my ankle sent me to hell and back endless time. This also resulted in missing out on Yeasayer which were playing next on the Pavilion stage. I was really looking forward to seeing these guys live on stage after their fabulous 2007 album, but the pain was just too much for me to go on (it took me almost half an hour to get back to my tent which was less than 5 minutes away).
So, day two was over, but what a day! Probably the best day of the festival, although there were more great acts to come during the following two days. You can see some footage from this day’s performance on the following clip I finally managed to edit (I’m not part of the YouTube generation so I had to quickly learn the tricks of basic video-editing).