Sweden RockSweden Rock Festival 2013 is over for this year. But fear not if you missed out! Salad Days were there to enjoy the fun, snap photos and enjoy the atmosphere as we have done previous years.

This year the fields of Swedish town Norje were drenched in sunlight almost throughout the whole festival. The weather was superb and could not have been better. The amount of beers that were sold during this year’s festival hit some kind of record. Apparently the festivalgoers drank so much beer that more had to be ordered between Friday and Saturday night.

 

- We did have beers in all of the bars when we closed at 3 pm tonight. But we got a new delivery just in case. It is important that we have enough beer, even in a safety aspect! The festivalgoers would not feel so amused if we ran out of beer, said the CEO of the festival Mats Natvig.

- We have never sold as much beer as this year, says Martin Forsmark. But that’s what happens when the festival gets sold out and the weather is this nice!

It was also the year of big productions. With bands like Kiss, Rush and Europe it calls for more crew, more safety measures and more electricity power than ever.  You could say that too was some sort of record for the festival to manage to pull that off as they did.

Live performance and press conference with Kiss

During the festival a few press conferences were held as per usual. We went to some of them but the one no one wanted to miss out on was the Kiss press conference.
Kiss turned up in full make-up and in their trademark outfits. As if anyone was expecting otherwise.
The set list that was set for the night’s concert had no surprises either.

- Well the fans expect us to play all the classics so we try to try to give them what they want. We try to make everybody happy, says Eric Singer.

The live performance by Kiss later on during the evening was a real treat for the audience. Not only music-wise but visually. The stage and the show was all designed and directed by Paul Stanley and rumor has it it was valid for 4 million dollars.

The stage show included one big spider weighing 50 ton, a wire running from the mixer tower to the stage, so that Paul Stanley could “fly” over the audience, and of coarse it also included pyrotechnics.
As promised during the press conference the set list did include a lot of their classics. They started out with “Psycho circus” and other classics like “Rock n roll all night”, “Let me go to rock n roll”, Detroit rock city” followed.

Still going strong

 

Skid Row

 

Spiders

 

At the Gates

 

Sweden Rock Festival is one of Sweden’s biggest festivals and as other festivals seem to loose their audiences and in the end liquidates, Sweden Rock still sells out every year with little over 33 000 tickets sold. They still manage to get their audience to come back year after year. Maybe it is because it stays the same. It is more or less the same kind of bands and music that get booked every other year.

You know what to expect when you visit Sweden Rock Festival. That is great rock n roll and a big party with a fantastic atmosphere!

Txt: Therese Botin

Photo: Christian Olsson