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Danish festivals turn up the competition with new reveals

As Danes prepare to turn their calendars to December and hunker down for winter, the summer music festival season is just starting to heat up.

Published: 30 November 2016 13:13 CET
Danish festivals turn up the competition with new reveals
Arcade Fire will return to Roskilde Festival for their first show in a decade. Photo: PR
Both the Roskilde Festival and NorthSide have made some major announcements this week, turning thoughts from the long and cold months ahead to what awaits us on the other side. 
 
The Aarhus-based NorthSide was the first out the gate this week, announcing on Tuesday that American R&B phenomenon Frank Ocean would headline one of the festival’s three nights in what will be just the singer’s second ever appearance in Denmark and part of his return to the stage after a three-year absence.
 
 
The announcement came on the heels of NorthSide’s major booking coup in the form of Radiohead's first Danish appearance in eight years. One-day tickets for Radiohead’s Sunday night gig at the festival quickly sold out and spokesman John Fogde said the addition of Frank Ocean would undoubtedly further boost sales. 
 
“We are very thrilled to have succeeded in getting the public’s two most-wished names on this year’s NorthSide poster. Radiohead and Frank Ocean are very infrequent guests in this country so it is really crazy that we managed to book them for the same year,” he said. 
 
With the pressure on from NorthSide’s impressive early start, the king of Danish music festivals, Roskilde Festival, responded on Wednesday by adding a full 24 new acts to its line-up, led by Canadian indie rock darlings Arcade Fire. 
 
“Arcade Fire have spearheaded a new generation of indie rock, and they've grown tremendously in terms of both ambition and popularity since their last visit to Roskilde Festival ten years ago,” festival spokesman Anders Wahrén said.
 
 
Roskilde Festival also added R&B singer Solange, arguably best known for being Beyonce’s little sister, American pop-punk act Blink-182 and French electronic duo Justice. 
 
“The acts that we've announced today are from 10 different countries and represent a myriad of different styles. On a larger scale, this sort of diversity is what's so important to us,” Wahrén said. “From Korea's Black String to a trend-setting urban artist like Kano. From a political star like Solange to something heavier like Red Fang, these artists all do something unique in totally different ways.”
 
The two dozen new acts added on Wednesday came just two weeks after Roskilde announced that American rock giants Foo Fighters would visit the festival for their only show in Scandinavia next year. Just under 40 of the roughly 175 eventual acts have now been revealed.
 
The full list of acts added to the Roskilde Festival on Wednesday can be seen here:
 
ARCADE FIRE (CA)
BLINK-182 (US)
JUSTICE (FR)
ERASURE (UK)
THE LUMINEERS (US)
SOLANGE (US)
WARPAINT (US)
BCUC (BANTU CONTINUA UHURU CONSCIOUSNESS) (ZA)
BLACK STRING (KR)
BLOOD COMMAND (NO)
CASHMERE CAT (NO)
JAGWAR MA (AU)
KELLERMENSCH (DK)
KEVIN MORBY (US)
MARGO PRICE (US)
KANO (UK)
MØME (FR)
NEUROSIS (US)
PRINCESS NOKIA (US)
RED FANG (US)
SVIN (DK)
VANISHING TWIN (UK)
VIAGRA BOYS (SE)
WIKI (US)
 
The NorthSide festival will take place June 9th through June 11th in Aarhus, while the Roskilde Festival will be held June 24th through July 1st. Tickets for both festivals are currently on sale.

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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.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
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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