Roskilde - The Festival

Camping for four nights initially looked a little imposing but in the end it was pretty straightforward. These guys have had practice at marshalling 120000 people and it shows - anyone Australia festival of that size would be much worse, considering the Big Day Out or Falls.

Toilets? Smelly but generally clean. Food? Plenty of range and decent prices. Showers? Not many but quite usable. Queues? Generally not too long, except for ATMs. Stages? A bit squashy at times but with a bit of forethought it wasn't hard to get a good spot for most. Bands? Good length sets of more than an hour and possibly encores. Crowd? Extremely good-natured for the most part, despite all the metal fans. Also heaps of free water up the front of stages which is great.

My highlight was probably the last band I saw, Animal Collective. They do a visceral, almost primitve set which strays a bit from the records and violates a few norms. I was right up the front on the rail and while the crowd wasn't huge, most were in some mood judging from the amounts of pot smoke. Best was the end of the set when they went off after an hour of energetic freak-folk. The crowd cheered, chanted, clapped, whistled, went ape. The announcer came out after two minutes to close the stage and was drowned out by the crowd, expecting more Animals. She tried again, and again, to quiet the frenzied masses but to no avail. Eventually one of the Animal Collective kids had to come back out and say "We can't play any more, it's over, thank you so much but this is it". Easily the best crowd reaction I've ever seen, from a crowd who just didn't want the festival to end.

Then, walking back to the tent with Nick, the strains of Roger Waters on the main stage, doing Pink Floyd's classic Wish You Were Here, as the pinkish northern evening light washed over the shattered remains of tents and beer and people and crushed grass. It couldn't have been scripted better - we felt like we were in a movie.

Other highlights. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were good fun, hello to those in Australia who'll see them soon. Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins were great, a really energetic, heartfelt, charming set of alt-country ballads. Tool were maybe not quite as good as I was expecting but still pretty great, as the only thing I really watched on the main stage. Editors started the festival off with a bang, and I walked away a bigger fan than I started.

Also fun was watching England v Portugal on the big screen overlooking the skate park. It was packed with predominantly English fans, but noone was too surprised at the result, after Rooney was sent off and it went to penalties.

Also good - chocolate crepes. More of them to come in France. And banana smoothies, just the thing in the pale but still hot northern sun.