Sziget festival
August 15th, 2007 by robertnemeth
Numerous concerts, huge crowd, alcohol - more than 370 thousand people thought that these are enough reasons to spend one week on an island - on the Sziget festival in Budapest, which is, as the name says, on one of the islands of the city.
Still, the organizers ended up with a deficit, due to the bad weather during the weekend. In addition, one of the main sponsors withdrew before the festival. The bad weather was real bad luck; so far heatwave and drought have been characteristic for this year’s summer, but from Friday night till Monday it was raining a lot. The consequence: many people stayed at home; there were 14 thousand less visitors than last year. But some of those who were there enjoyed even the mud and took a bath in it.
Regarding the program, the 15th Sziget festival was among the bests. The organizers made some incomprehensible mistakes though, like scheduling Madness and living rai-legend Rachid Taha at the same time, or putting the concert of Gogol Bordello as early as 4:30pm on the main stage.
Rating concerts is very subjective, of course, furthermore, no one can attend all of them, but this year Manu Chao, Rachid Taha, Skatalites, Värttinä and Leningrad did their best. Some people in the crowd felt during the concert of Manu Chao and Leningrad that in a few minutes not only balls, flags, bottles and people will fly above the audience, but even some mobile toilets. And let’s forget about the blackout that occurred while Manu Chao was playing.
As every year, the range was huge regarding the performers. Just to mention some more: Nine Inch Nails, The Killers, Chemical Brothers, Faithless, Pink, The Hives, Sinéad O’Connor, Orchestre National De Barbès, Tinariwen, Cesaria Evora, Sergent Garcia and there were many Hungarian groups as well.
On the Sziget, there are two main stages - one for those groups who are rather in the mainstream, and one for world music. Besides them, there are other, smaller stages and tents, for blues, jazz, heavy metal, alternative music or even for Hungarian pop. That is not all: if one is interested, he or she can go to a theatre play or a dance performance, or to the Afro-latin village to watch belly-dance, capoeira and samba, and this year, even haka.
So, the old slogan, “there is a need for one week together” is still true. But next time, let’s hope to do it without the rain…
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