The Motörhead concert made me smile a couple of times. Before the concert even started fans where lining up outside the pit hoping to get a spot up front. But another concert had to be taken care of first - a nice surfer dude called Jack Johnson. So two long rows of people waiting for very different kinds of music were peacefully roasting side by side under the summer sun - there was something strangely poetic about it.When Motörhead finally did go on I had a flashback to last year when Judas Priest was playing: They are all around retirement age and were getting increasing more red and sweaty in the face as the concert went on. Those guys had so much leather and metal on that all of us were worried sick about them because it was boiling hot that day. The Motörhead guys are even older, but they look more sturdy and didn't have nearly as much metal on but they still had way too much clothes on considering the weather. Vanity comes before fall, heh.
There was a dancing guy in the audience who had taken the road in the opposite direction and stripped everything off. That in itself isn't an unusual sight at Roskilde, you see enough naked people there to last you a year or two, but what he was doing with said naked body was swinging it around and around and around and around and then a bit of headbanging and then swing around and around ... this dude was fairly tall and whenever he would swing, he would jump, and that jump put his crotch at most women's eye level. I kept staring at him for 15 min, just waiting to see if he was going to hit someone in the face! It came pretty damn close a few times, but apparently women are pretty good at dodging penile attacks.
During the week I realized one thing that made me a bit sad. You get dirty on a festival and I don't want to go through a whole week without taking a shower if I can avoid it (it's just so damn nice to feel clean). But on a big festival like Roskilde you have to slack on normal routines. There's no way I'm going all the way back to Copenhagen to take a shower and it seems silly to spend money on a hot shower that you could spend on food, so if it isn't too cold I jump in the cold showers. The cold ones are free, open to everyone and since it was hot it was a nice cool down too. But it dawned on me how much has changed since the 90's: I was the only one who got completely naked! When I started going to Roskilde over a decade ago jumping into the cold showers wasn't a big thing; everyone ended up doing it when it was really hot anyway and if you had a pair of undies on people thought you were a bit silly. If you were that worried about others seeing you naked then you probably should pay for privacy in the hot showers. I had noticed that it was getting more and more common to wear bikinis and shorts, but this was the first year that I was the only naked one. You can't get clean if you cover up, if you can't get clean then it isn't really a shower anymore and you are just showing off. It can't be that people have started lusting after each other more because we looked at each other back then too so what the hell went wrong?
After I got home I looked at pictures from the first festivals and compared them to what I saw this year: Roskilde has turned into another place where you have to be "pretty". Diversity in people is becoming extinct there. Well ... I'm sad that part is going, but it's still the best place for getting a wide range of music. So! I guess one thing hasn't changed: This was another year where I promised myself it would be the last time - and I'm already gearing up for next year ^^
