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ROSKILDE FESTIVAL 2015

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Roskilde starts festival season earlier than ever

Nine months before music fans take over Roskilde, the festival announced its first nine acts and began ticket sales.

Published: 30 September 2014 11:50 CEST

Roskilde starts festival season earlier than ever

Lamb of God. Press photo

The Roskilde Festival kickstarted the 2015 summer music festival cycle on Tuesday with the announcement of nine acts highlighted by American metal band Lamb of God’s first ever appearance at the festival.

In addition to the Virginia-based metallers, the festival announced that Danish prog-pop band Mew would play Roskilde as its only Danish festival gig in what could be seen as a subtle dig at the promoters behind the newly-announced Odense festival Tinderbox. Mew is represented by the Danish booking agency Beatbox, which Roskilde and a handful of other festivals are planning to blacklist over the agency’s “dual role” at Tinderbox.

See also: Danish music festivals gearing up for a fight

Danish hip-hop group Suspekt was also announced on Tuesday, with organisers promising “a late-night celebration on Orange Stage”.

The other names included in the first batch of announcements for the 2015 festival were electronic artists Rustie and Dixon, blues rock act Dolomite Minor, singer Khaira Arby from Timbuktu, avant-garde string quartet Kronos Quartet and Brooklyn metal band Tombs.

Tickets for the 2015 Roskilde Festival went on sale on Tuesday in what marks the earliest ever opening of sales for the iconic Danish festival.

The 2015 Roskilde Festival will begin on June 27th and run through July 4th, starting one day earlier in the week than normal.

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New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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