Last weekend was Northside festival weekend! Sunday, Saturday and Friday were spent with beer in plastic cups, music filling the ears and pretty people everywhere. I did 2 x 8 hours of work, as a teamleader for the Student House in the Green Bar, and got a free ticket to the festival in return.
Friday was my work-free day and I went to enjoy the music with Tina and some of her biological friends. I started the day with a concert of Daughter, but it was Kaisers Orchestra an hour or two later that really impressed me with an inspiring concert. In the evening, I was truly disappointed by Keane: despite his fans and the music he's made, he couldn't hide his arrogance while on stage. Someone told me he should be compared to something like Coldplay, but he's not - he's simply not a nice guy. In addition, he was the living proof you don't need to be able to dance to make it to a festival stage, and when his only interaction with the public was when he started clapping for himself, it became a little bit ridiculous.
There was also The Knife, and there is only one word to describe their concert: it was weird. It started out with some psychedelic music which I thought was the intro, but turned out to be the concert. There will ten dressed up girls on the stage dancing intensely and it took until the last twenty minutes to hear some vocals. The end of the night came with the sounds of the Danish band Nephew, who played for a home crowd and did what Keane couldn't: inspire the public.
During the weekend and the days before, we had some friends (or friends of friends) making use of our spare living room bed, and so on Saturday I left for the festival grounds with my lovely roommate Catalina, her Italian friend Elena and Danish boyfriend Thomas. Not before picking up some raincoats, because the forecast predicted some real Danish weather for the day - read: showers! However, for me soon the time came to start my first shift and become responsible for 23 volunteers in the biggest bar of the festival.
It was hard work, and my job certainly wasn't the hardest. I fixed some problems, did some explanation and tried to keep everyone happy by running around with candies. Team C, however, served a lot of customers and poured even more beers. Luckily, being in the center bar, we could enjoy a lot of the music while working. Worth remembering were Alt J, Kings of Convenience, Imagine Dragons, but most importantly... Nick Cave! Ah, music!
After eight hours of hard work, when the festival grounds were empty and the bar cleaned up, we poured ourselves some after-work beers and saw our bar manager Niels wearing a weird (but apparently, warm) jacket. A few hours of sleep later, I had to be back, because my next eight hours of shift started at 11h.
This time, we died. Sixteen hours of work in less than 24 hours - too much. I did my best to keep morale up for everyone, but in the last hours, I had some moments of weakness. Luckily, the team was great and everything worked smoothly - with the exception of a little incident with our beer draft machine, which suddenly started pouring beer unstoppably.
Luckily, to beat the fatigue, there was music. The beautiful Ellie Goulding and Fun in the afternoon, Gogol Bordello, Kashmir, Band of Horses, ... And after my work was finished (and I stuffed myself with food to recover somewhat), there were the great Arctic Monkeys and pretty Portishead to finish off a great weekend. Despite playing as the final band, this time of the year in Denmark, it never really gets dark outside.
See you next year!
Vincent
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