Live review: Hultsfred Festival, Sweden

To go to a music festival with prior knowledge of only a handful of the headline acts (in this case, a diverse selection ranging from Ozzy Osbourne to 50 Cent, Dizzee Rascal to Pet Shop Boys) generates a certain sense of freedom; none of the obligatory frenzied dashing between stages that comes when you want to see nearly all of the acts performing.

A few cool Kopparberg pear cider over ice and with our trusty pocket-sized festival guide in our bag, and our finely-honed translation skills (luckily the Swedish for words like pop, rock, electronica and reggae are “pop”, “rock”, “electronica” and “reggae”) we selected some unknowns to check out.
It must be noted that as this festival was in Sweden, home of the beautiful people, we truly were surrounded by a race that even seemed to carry off the I-haven’t-seen-a-shower-in-a-week look with panache. In particular, the boys had an inherent stylish essence that (we’re sorry!!) most Irish guys still don’t embody. Skinny jeans, fitted black vests, scarves, Converse and of course, the obligatory trendy haircut was the uniform of the weekend. As Amy Winehouse noted while surveying the crowd between drinks, the audience really looked pretty good - she’s used to doing festivals where everyone just wears stupid hats!
There were some art installations/social commentary activities in the transient areas between stages. One area had a small catwalk and cardboard cut-outs where you could stick your head through, onto the bodies of people dressed in various different styles. There was a questionnaire you could fill in (or not, as it was in Swedish) and, like a cheesy women’s magazine, see what category you were slotted in to; hip-hop, punk, emo etc. You could then pick up a t-shirt, depending on your style category, with different slogans printed on them. People were proudly sporting their t-shirts all weekend (true, perhaps they were the only clean clothes…), some had even been customized.
Another interactive piece was quite simply some blank hoarding and chunky markers. You could draw around each other’s bodies, like the white line in a crime movie. After a few hours, the layers and layers of bodies were building up, lines of blue, green, red and black interlacing into a tangle of linear limbs. Everyone who took part received a sticker that simply said “JAG ÅR ETT KONST-VERK” (supposedly “I am a piece of artwork”).
At the last performance of the festival, 4am on the Saturday night, we had been recommended to attend “Slagmålsklubben”, described to us as “Nintendo music”. How could we resist? The performance was not one to be forgotten; the curtains in the tent drew back to reveal a long table stretched right across the stage, last-supper-style, fabric draped and gathered across the front, like a U.S. presidential election speech set. There was a spinning wheel made of cut-out legs fanning out, like something that would be on a Derek Mooney game-show set in a parallel universe. The band poured out, a constant ebb and flow of people on stage; band members messing with computers, decks and instruments, friends zoning in with camcorders, random punters wandering around.
They produced a sort of electronic music that seemed to just hypnotize the wildly enthusiastic pulsating crowd. This band, in theory Swedish, were ridiculously badly dressed. You could see they tried the cool-nerd look. Between them, they had side-partings, thick framed glasses and a general awkwardness. Most of the band were wearing white wifebeaters with a pattern printed on them, accompanied by various different coats, tops and scarves. The leading man, well the one who took performing more seriously than the music, was adorned in a pale yellow tracksuit (top and bottom) with a vest below. He also wore with spunk a baseball cap with flat peak at a jaunty angle, and some bling gold medallions. Of course this man was as far from the likes of 50 Cent (who the day before had seriously worn this style) as could be, he was as far from our pre-concieved notions of Swedish men as could be. He was weedy and white, wore glasses and had bad teeth… but was exceedingly entertaining! Even in Sweden there are the un-cool, trying to be great, not succeeding, but gaining respect for what they do anyway.
Our festival experience was concluded by another event, which really proved that people are the same the world over. Returning to our tent at 5 in the morning, after 20 hours of rain, we were distraught to discover our rucksack was missing from our tent, and all the other things that remained (for some reason, they took out and left behind some CDs we had bought, our washbags, our sleeping bags… they only took our clothes and food…) were soaked through, as they had kindly not zipped back up the tent when they had taken off with their loot.
We guessed that our possessions would be of absolutely no use to anyone, so set off to search for them. Thanks to the bright pink colour of the bag of the last-minute-buy Dunnes tent, we found all our clothes scattered on the sodden grass near the fence at the edge of the camp-site. That'll teach us...