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Denmark’s summer festival race heats up

A total of 30 new musical acts were rolled out in duelling announcements from Roskilde Festival and Tinderbox on Thursday, with the NorthSide Festival making additions of its own earlier this week.

Denmark's summer festival race heats up
Mastodon was one of 24 new acts added to the 2015 Roskilde Festival line-up. Photo: Roadrunner Records
As the final days of winter wind down, the competition on the summer music festival circuit is heating up. 
 
In a span of just two hours on Thursday, Tinderbox and Roskilde Festival announced a combined 30 new acts for their respective summer festivals.
 
The upstart Tinderbox got things rolling with the 10am addition of James Blake, Major Lazer, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Go Go Berlin, Emeli Sande and Sheppard. 
 
Those additions follow on to the Odense-based festival’s announcements of acts including The Prodigy, Faith No More and Modest Mouse in recent weeks. The festival's initial line-up announcement included the likes of Robbie Williams, Calvin Harris and The Cardigans.
 
First introduced in September, Tinderbox will be holding its inaugural festival June 26-28 in Odense’s Tusindårsskoven, wrapping up just two days before the main musical portion of the 44th annual Roskilde Festival gets underway. 
 
Two hours after Tinderbox's new additions, Roskilde on Thursday announced a full 24 new acts highlighted by American prog-metal giants Mastodon, former Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds and Swedish sister act First Aid Kit. Both Mastodon and First Aid Kits are repeat guests, the former having played in 2011, 2007 and 2005 and the latter appearing in 2012. 
 
Roskilde’s Thursday announcement had a distinctly Scandinavian flavor, with eight Danish acts – highlighted by the reunited dancehall sensation Bikstok – two acts from Sweden and three from Norway, including the DJ sensation Kygo. 
 
Roskilde has previously said that Pharrell Williams, Lamb of God, Disclosure, Muse and The War on Drugs, to name just a few. 
 
Not to be left out from the festival picture is NorthSide. Although the Aarhus festival wasn’t part of Thursday’s explosion of new acts, it did add English singer-songwriter Ben Howard and American rapper Earl Sweatshirt, among others, on Tuesday and has already announced big names including the Black Keys, Wu-Tang Clan, Little Dragon and the Jesus and Mary Chain. 
 
NorthSide will hold its sixth annual festival June 12-14. 
 
With more than three months to go – and dozens of acts still to be revealed – it’s looking like the clear winner in the three-way festival race will be music fans in Denmark and its surrounding countries. 

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FESTIVAL

France’s Fête de la musique ‘will go ahead, with masks and a curfew’

France's famous summer music festival the Fête de la musique will go ahead, but with health restrictions in place, says the culture minister.

France's Fête de la musique 'will go ahead, with masks and a curfew'
Photo: ABDULMONAM EASSA / AFP

Culture minister Roselyn Bachelot, taking part in a Q&A session with readers of French newspaper le Parisien, confirmed that the annual summer festival will go ahead this year on its usual date of June 21st.

The festival date is normally marked with thousands of events across France, from concerts in tiny villages to huge open-air events in big cities and street-corner gigs in local neighbourhoods.

Last year the festival did go ahead, in a scaled-down way, and Bachelot confirmed that the 2021 event will also happen, but with restrictions.

She said: “It will be held on 21st June and will not be subject to the health passport.

“People will be able to dance, but it will be a masked party with an 11pm curfew.”

Under France’s phased reopening plan, larger events will be allowed again from June 9th, but some of them will require a health passport (with either a vaccination certificate or a recent negative test) to enter.

The Fête de la musique, however, is generally focused around lots of smaller neighbourhood concerts.

The curfew is being gradually moved back throughout the summer before – if the health situation permits – being scrapped entirely on June 30th.

Bachelot added: “I appeal to everyone’s responsibility.

“The rate of 50 percent of people vaccinated should have been reached by then, so we will reach an important level of immunity.”

The Fête de la musique is normally France’s biggest street party, with up to 18,000 events taking place across the country on the same day.

It’s hugely popular, despite being (whisper it) the idea of an American – the concept is the brainchild of American Joel Cohen, when he was working as a music producer for French National Radio (France Musique) in the 1970s.

By 1982 the French government put its weight behind the idea and made it an official event and it’s been a fixture in the calendar ever since. 

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