By Thomas Møller Photo: TM B/A

Every year, some 150 bands perform at Roskilde Festival. But how are they selected and on what criteria is the Festival bill stitched together.

We present a bouquet of 150 bands - one which the audience can safely trust. The Festival's selection criteria ensure that the level and quality are okay. Whether it suits your taste is another, more personal matter," says Leif Skov, day-to-day manager of the Roskilde Festival.

A deliberate and definite change to the profile of the Festival has been introduced since last year:

Roskilde is a rock festival again!

To an even greater extent than before, Roskilde Festival will revolve around younger, contemporary and up-to-date rock music!

Roskilde Festival will show that rock music does not stand still, but evolves. We want the Festival to instigate change and contribute towards the wider acceptance of new musical idioms," Leif Skov explains.

„In five years time, we would like our audience to be able to say about some world-famous band or other that they saw them at Roskilde, right up front, so they could almost touch them… like, for example, the time we had Oasis and Blur before they really made names for themselves."

Bombarded with offers

Policy discussions about the Festival's musical profile are conducted in the Music Committee - one of a total of 40 Roskilde Festival working groups. It is all about style directions, level, image and the likes.

„The discussions in the Music Committee form the basis for the Festival management's daily work. Throughout the year, we are bombarded with offers from agents. Offers which we have to be able to say yes or no to," Leif Skov relates.

„Of course, there are offers which we are not sure about and which, therefore, we leave to simmer. We let time tell. See how the band and the Festival's programming evolve. We make running adjustments, what is missing, etc. We work with a schedule, plotting days, stages and times and the schedule grows throughout the autumn and winter."

A mixed bag

Roskilde Festival has status and attracts a level of media attention which makes it attractive for agents, record companies and musicians. An appearance at Roskilde Festival can save a band for a whole autumn tour. Indeed, a really good performance can mean a career leap of six months to a whole year.

„In the Music Committee, we are influenced by agents and record companies, we read a sea of international music magazines and go to as many concerts as we can cope with," Leif Skov says.

„We also have volunteers in the countries from which most of our audience come. They go to local venues and hear something they are enthusiastic about, write to us and tell us about it. That type of information comes from the Nordic countries and Germany in particular."

„We publish a response coupon in the Festival programme and we have an interview team out at the actual Festival. We ask our guests who they would like to hear at next year's festival and if there are a lot of people who would like to hear Eric Clapton, then you can rest assured that they'll be disappointed. But if, for example, a Finn, a German and somebody from the North of Jutland all want the same totally unknown band, then it suddenly becomes interesting…"

„In this way we collate a mass of information and input and feed it all into our computer," he explains.

Then it is up to us in the Music Committee and the day-to-day management to taste the brew and give it marks.

When we are putting together the Festival programme, we try to achieve a geographical balance as well as a spread in genres and the size of the bands.

We try to play down the Anglo-Saxon dominance with bands from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Denmark, because most of our guests come from these countries. But we also book bands from, for example, Holland, France and Spain. We want to give our audience a taster of what is going on in those countries, with preferably new names, so a Finn, too, can enjoy new impulses by experiencing a Finnish band at Roskilde.

A lot of scoops

„As the biggest scoops over the years at Roskilde Festival, Leif Skov names Talking Heads in 1979 and U2 in 1982. Both were promising bands when they were booked, but whose appearances at Roskilde Festival proved them to be the stars of the future they turned out to be. But there have been a lot of scoops over the years," Leif Skov emphasises.

„Many bands have been booked on the basis of their records and then turned out to be much better live. Bands who turn up and simply knock an audience dead. There are several of them every year."

„We might have got it wrong a couple of times with populist outfits like Rusted/Kreutzfeldt, Tøsedrengene and Sweden's Europe …. „The Final Countdown", you know … they provoked a negative reaction from the audience. No, if we are to have that type of band it has to be with a glint in the eye, a sense for the kitsch, like when Peter Belli performed - he was a great success."

Last year it was the Sex Pistols' concert which gave rise to subsequent debate. Leif Skov admits that the audience's negative reaction surprised the festival.

„The audience's reaction was surprising. Not a fiasco, not a scandal, but surprising. The audience were punks, who said: punk's glory days were 15 years ago, let it rest in peace, Sex Pistols shouldn't play any more, we are here to stop the concert! The band themselves didn't take the trouble very seriously and were ready to go back on for a third time - what the fuck - it's punk after all! Then I stepped in and said stop. Because I knew that the audience's reaction would repeat itself. But we don't regret booking Sex Pistols. The idea of seeing them again was good and typical of the times."

Moss doesn't grow…

This year, the 27th edition of the Roskilde Festival is being planned by the same people for the tenth year in a row. The objective is still that the average age of the audience shouldn't rise and it has hovered somewhere between 23 and 24.

„The new profile is deliberately designed to mark Roskilde out as a contemporary festival. Okay, we present 150 bands, and of course there is room for ten festive reunions with old faces like C.V. Jørgensen, for example, as proof positive that in rock music there is also such a thing as a timeless idiom," Leif Skov explains.

„But as a festival, we do not want to be judged on and identified with a handful of established stars. If that policy means that Roskilde Festival in a few years time is only twice as big as the second biggest music festival in the Nordic countries, then so be it."