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Danish music festivals announce 2016 names

Roskilde, Northside and Tinderbox festivals announce headliners for 2016, including Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Beck and Rammstein.

Danish music festivals announce 2016 names
Red Hot Chilli Peppers set to play Roskilde Orange stage. Photo: Henning Bagger/Scanpix 2011

Denmark’s largest music festival Roskilde has announced that the American band The Red Hot Chilli Peppers (RHCP) will be headlining the 2016 festival.

The RHCP first performance at Roskilde was in 1996 and it will be the first time since 2007 that the band will grace the festival's stage.

The band has sold over 80 million albums worldwide, and the release of their 11th studio album is scheduled for the same year they return to Roskilde.

“There have been persistent rumours about the return of RHCP for a long, long time. We’re thrilled that they finally turned out to be true. We’ve been told that they can’t wait to come back to play, living up to – and underlining – their status as a legendary rock act”, Anders Wahren, Head of Programme, said in a recent press release.

The RHCP last performance at Roskilde in 2007 received poor reviews from critics and audiences alike.  Talking to DR, Roskilde Program Manager Donald Wahren reassured festival goers that;

“When they played in Herning in 2011, they received a really good response from both audiences and critics, so there is nothing to suggest that poor concerts have been a recurring phenomenon.”

Other internationally acclaimed acts such as Courtney Barnett, Mac De Marco and Action Bronson have already been confirmed for Roskilde 2016.

The Aarhus based festival Northside announced that indie-rock artist Beck will be headlining next year. He will be joining confirmed artists Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Lukas Graham, Bernhoft, Minds of 99 and Malk De Koijn in 2016.

The Tinderbox festival, based in Odense, also announced last week that the German Industrial metal band Rammstein will be headlining the festival on Funen. The festival has promised that the German band will be joined by another International headliner in 2016, yet to be announced.

 

 

CULTURE

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

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

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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