Roskilde on vo.rs

Roskilde: The Festival That Gives All Its Money Away

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Roskilde 2025: Still Giving It All Away

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Festival Toilets: Civilisation Measured in Portaloos

Fri, 30 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Roskilde Naked Run: The Festival's Oldest, Barest Tradition

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is a moment on the Saturday of Roskilde Festival, somewhere in the sprawling chaos of the campsite, when a crowd thickens along a stretch of dirt track, a countdown goes up, and a few dozen entirely naked people take off running for a lap while thousands cheer them home. This is the Roskilde Naked Run, and it is the daftest, most good-humoured, most reliably Danish thing on the whole festival calendar. I have stood in that crowd more than once — Roskilde is home turf for me, the festival I keep coming back to — and I can tell you the run is exactly as silly and exactly as warm-hearted as its reputation promises. Here is where it came from and why it still, gloriously, happens.

Roskilde 2023: Back to Full Strength

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Roskilde 2019: The Last Summer Before the Silence

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Nobody at Roskilde 2019 knew they were living through the last one for a while, which is exactly why it plays back so strangely now. Held from 29 June to 6 July, it was a completely ordinary edition of an extraordinary festival — a wide, warm, sprawling week in the Zealand fields with a top-heavy bill and the usual hundred-thousand-strong temporary city around it. Then the world shut, the 2020 and 2021 festivals were cancelled to silence, and 2019 became, in retrospect, a kind of farewell nobody attended as a farewell. I have gone back to it in my head more than any other year, precisely because it was so normal.

Roskilde 2017: The Year the Mud Won

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Every Roskilde regular keeps a private ranking of the years, and 2017 is filed, in most of the ones I know, under the muddy one. The rain came on the Friday and the site never fully recovered its footing; the camping fields turned to the particular grey-brown churn that gets into your boots, your tent, your food and your soul, and by the back half of the week you were navigating a hundred thousand people’s worth of trodden mud on progressively less sleep. And yet — this is the thing about Roskilde — it was still, by common agreement of nearly everyone I spoke to, a magnificent week. The mud won the war of attrition. It did not win the festival.

Roskilde 2015: Orange Feeling in the Rain

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 09:00:00 +0000

The 2015 edition is the one where a Beatle closed the Orange Stage and the sky spent a week deciding whether it liked us. Paul McCartney headlined the final Saturday, 4 July, and the whole festival bent itself around that fact for days beforehand — an actual member of the band that half your parents’ record collections were built on, standing under the orange canopy that his old rivals the Rolling Stones commissioned in the seventies. If you want a single image for how strange and how big Roskilde gets, it is a 72-year-old Liverpudlian playing to a field in Zealand under a Stones-era awning while a hundred thousand Danes lose their minds in the drizzle.