By Kim Skotte Photo:Negativ

It was baking hot. Music was playing somewhere or other on the distant glimmering horizon. Maybe it was Mo-i-Rana, Dr. Dopo Jam or Palles Nosser. No idea. We lounged about in the shade of the pale yellow tent and the world pitched softly under us as if the ground were elastic. There were joints going round, but most people were content to quaff lukewarm beer by the crateful. Bellies were chalky white and hair was long. The petty bourgeoisie Mallorca sunbathing trip held no appeal to us and under normal circumstances the sun had difficulty piercing the armour of down-at-the-heel clogs, ski socks, blue denim jackets, parental care, Icelandic sweaters and the cloud of tobacco smoke which enshrouded us for most of the year. But there was something special about the sun over Roskilde. Something lazy and ticklish.

This was a high class excursion. We had a tent with a groundsheet. Unfortunately. All sorts of crap had a habit of congregating in there. Indeterminate leftovers nobody could really be bothered cleaning up. The taste of sun dust had to be washed down. The peculiar festival mixture of sun-dried dust and urine. On a warm day it makes the air stink sickeningly sweetish, like a perverse soft-ice. It only takes a few drops of rain to transform it into to the legendary festival mud. Washing down the dust was full-time job, with lots of overtime on the nightshift. While the music played - they tell me. In the morning, when we crawled out of our tents with the distinct collective feeling of having slept with each others smelly toes in our mouths - we crashed headlong into a classic European clash of cultures. The Germans in the next tent were in the middle of breakfast. The doughty Teutons might have been hippie types, but they lived up to their countrymen's suspect culinary reputation. Without so much as a shaky hand, they were fishing 30 cm long, inch-thick Bockwurst from a glass full of liquid with a screwtop and scoffing these terrifying looking things in genuine Teutonic sabre-swallowing manner. To breakfast.

Dizzy and with little appetite, my mate Søren and I ventured forth into the festival morning.

The sun shone again. It always did in those days. Well, when it wasn't raining at any rate. A lot of people were still lying where they had keeled over. Others were quietly and calmly in the process of getting their act together again, aided and abetted by the very substances which had reduced them to comatose corpses in the first place. Sensible, like only the man with a hangover can be - dry behind the eyes, skin irritable - we wandered about and let it slowly dawn on us that we were well on our way into the second world.

Then, suddenly, she was sitting there. A beautiful, power-woman with long blond hair reclining against a fence. A few years older. Naked. As if it was the most natural thing in the world. Legs akimbo, revealing each and every shining fold and blood-brown lip in their full glory. For a boy who had not been near a female sexual organ since birth and who had his theoretical anatomical knowledge from the one-dimensional gloss of the centre-page, it came as a total revelation. None of the usual huge variety of inventive, smart-arsed designations for cunt sprang to mind. Look at that. You. We nudged each other. Not stupidly. Almost sheepish. We just stood there and knew, both of us, that this was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen. This was our first insight into a new reality as well as the birth of an intimate little brotherhood. Knights who had finally caught a glimpse of the Holy Grail could not have been more enraptured by the moment. It was like a point of no return.

We went on. I don't think she even noticed us when we passed through her on our way into the new world. It was a world expanding like the shock waves from the epicentre of an earthquake, and in the words of C.V. Jørgensen it was a world which was suddenly wide open and would never close again. Like the painful tenderness which afflicts body and soul when the sun comes back up again, out of the blue, in the middle of the whole thing. In the future, when ethnographers study the late 20th century they will uncover a confusing mixture of absurd hollow traditions and a few new ones none too keen on that epitaph. All societies have rites to celebrate the crucial transformations in life. From one stage to another. Birth. Death. Marriage. The transition to the ranks of adulthood is all about taking your place and responsibilities in the grown-up world. Confirmation nowadays, however, is mostly about presents and takes place at a point when any such phrase as "welcome to the ranks of adulthood" has a hollow ring to it. The transition is as much a question of adopting a sexual identity, and for many of us Roskilde Festival and other rock festivals became the real party at which this transition was celebrated. The phrase rock'n'roll originally meant a roll in the hay, you know.

Roskilde Festival is something special. It has a long history, is closely associated with the evolution of Danish rock and its musical profile has become more distinct as the years go by, rather than more diffuse. Roskilde Festival is where you satisfy your curiosity - and sometimes satiate it! - about new music and where it is heading. In an era when rock music is branching off at all sorts of tangents, Roskilde Festival puts a lot of effort into holding the musical door wide open. Roskilde is the guitar rock festival, but it is also the place to hear Haitian pop, Arabic dance, New Zealand heavy metal and the Kronos Quartet. An extremely lively music culture is, of course, Roskilde Festival's raison d'être, but in relation to so many other festivals and musical summer festivals Roskilde is also very much a cultural event.

Roskilde Festival arose out of genuine youth culture and not as some more or less arbitrary source of income in the summer cultural landscape.

The festival has always perceived itself as being something more than just music, something different, and it shows in the range of events on offer. Young people from all over Northern Europe stream to the town in Sealand. Musical tribes transcending national borders. Music is the common reference point as, for a few days, the festival constitutes a surprisingly peaceful realisation of some much belittled, threadbare slogans about peace and tolerance. All thanks to music.

One can always be sure of getting a dose of culture home with you from Roskilde. Scrap culture and dressed-up performance art prepare surprises for you at every corner. A baldy man munching insects and his friend with an iron hanging from his ears are a sure sign the Jim Rose Circus Side-show is in town. If you don't encounter some chubby prophet from the mainstream of pop culture starting to levitate in the morning mist, you can be sure of being confronted with the sorts of projects which, for example, highlight the plight of Native American Indian culture and the wretched political and social conditions in the homeland of rock.

Culture is many things. It is one thing to try to get rid of the notorious pigsty ambience of rock festivals with a long overdue dose of green thinking. It is another to go bargain hunting in the small stalls' range of leather purses from god knows where, woolly jumpers, leather boots, records, poetry collections and posters with rock's whirlwind of alternating icons. But regardless of how much information Amnesty International can provide about human rights, how many movies you catch in the campsite cinema, how many mystical meatballs you devour from the 5th world - generally situated somewhere far removed from 7th heaven - or how much you are cheered up by an outer-Mongolian mimic balancing on top of a Volkswagen, Roskilde Festival-culture is still first and foremost culture thanks to its participants and its music.

It is an ethnographic experience of the major league variety trying to study all the different hair-dos, piercing rings, tattoos, styles of clothing and cryptic messages on flags and bits of paper. Hippies, punks, anoraks. There is room for everybody in a magic circle which has the strange effect that even those who drink themselves stupid usually manage to remember to keep their hearts and minds in the right place. Even the most inebriated Finn can fall down drunk with absolute peace of mind, safe in the knowledge that he will not be trampled to death. The tone is not just more relaxed, but also more stoned, tolerant and human than the average Danish Christmas dinner.

And then there is the music! Some people measure and weigh the festival year for year and proclaim it either good or less good - somehow over the years a really bad Roskilde Festival has become unthinkable. My own memory is less systematically organised. The best experiences are encapsulated in a clear, translucent fluid. Souvenirs which don't care about the year and which contain more than superlatives from a faded review. Here are some of the more recent ones:

Like the time a couple of years ago when I had to abandon my car because Aerosmith were stuck in the traffic jam from hell - and make the rest of the journey on foot - at double time - in order to catch Grant Lee Buffalo. The chubby Grant Lee Phillips and his musicians rewarded me with one of the most beautiful concerts at which I have ever had the privilege to be present.

Or like the time the rain was pouring down in - even by Roskilde's standards - unheard of volumes and transformed the festival into a dish served in ankle-deep brown sauce. But despite it all, the sauce felt warm around the legs and even though the rain poured down in thick, tropical streams, doughty Billy Idol stood astride the top of the ramp and displayed true showmanship. Mr. Idol treated the raging elements like a reluctant motorbike as we flopped about in the mud. The monsoon was unable to dislodge a single one of the spiky, platinum blonde hairs on Billy's head. Billy Idol has been slagged off as a "oaf and a pin-up" but that day he was a man after my heart. And then there was the night when Neil Young turned the summer moon into a "Harvest Moon". Not to mention the day when I was feeling faint and sunsick but was shaken to the very core of my being by Jeff Buckley's vocals which graciously reduced all earthly conditions to something less relevant.

Because when the music really gets going, the very word "culture" is suddenly reduced to a thin, little, bureaucratic-sounding concept with precious little in common with the real world. A quick draught from the door which Roskilde Festival holds ajar every year. A door which for some people opens out onto a wide open world and refuses ever to close again...