The Roskilde Festival is the largest music festival in Northern Europe. It has been held annually in the Danish town of Roskilde since 1971. Bob Marley, U2, Metallica, Radiohead and other international stars have performed at the festival.
The Roskilde Festival was founded in 1971 by two high school students, Jesper Møller and Mogens Sandfør, with the help of promoter Carl Fischer. It was the first festival in Denmark created for hippies, but over time its audience has expanded considerably. Since 1972, the festival has been organized and run by the Roskilde Festival Charity Society, a non-profit organization focused on the development and support of music, culture and humanism.
The Roskilde Festival program features a variety of musical genres – alternative rock, psychedelic rock, punk rock, heavy metal, pop, synth-pop, reggae, hip-hop, indie, folk and ethno, electronic music and others. The organizers try to invite both world-famous artists and aspiring musicians, for whom the festival helps to make a name for themselves.
Until the mid-1990s, the Roskilde Festival was attended mainly by Scandinavians, but now it is also popular with tourists from other European countries – Germany, Great Britain and others. In 2013 more than 180 bands and performers performed at the festival, and the number of visitors exceeded 130 thousand. If we add to this number 3 thousand musicians, 5 thousand media representatives and 21 thousand volunteers, it turns out that the festival is annually visited by more than 160 thousand people.
Usually the festival in Roskill takes place at the end of June – beginning of July. The festival grounds (covering an area of about 80 hectares) open a few days before the official start of the festival. These days are called “warm-up days” and are filled with impromptu concerts and parties. During the festival, concerts take place on several stages with capacities ranging from a thousand to 60,000 spectators. Traditionally, it opens with a concert of a Scandinavian band on the Big (Orange) stage.
Since 1999, the Radio Festival in Roskilde has been organizing “nude races” around the festival town. The two winners of the race (male and female) get free tickets to the next festival. In recent years, the race has become so popular that there is even a qualifier for male participants.