Festival Pulls Global Crowd

Sziget Festival is held in the middle of the month of August and spans across a week of fun and music. The festival kicks off with what is known as Day 0.  Only campers have access to this event and it usually involves a fantastic performance from one classic rock band. This year, Iron Maiden rocked out for what seemed to be every single Maiden fan from every corner of Europe. The crowd which attended the Day 0 kick off this year created a warped scene as metal heads were everywhere. Many of them departed by the following day and the crowd was transformed into a sea of dreadlocked hippies, kids, students and people of all ages dressed in the bright summer fashions of UK and Europe. 

The first day of official festivities saw the likes of Anti-Flag, MGMT, the Floggong Molly, Alanis Morisette and the Kooks. American bred band Anti-flag were reminiscent of Green Day but had a sharper edge. The crowd expended the most energy rocking to Flag’s “The Bright Lights of America” and “You Can Kill the Protestor”. MGMT had much hype surrounding their set and proved to rock harder on stage with a live audience than on record, “Electric Feel” got the crowd dancing and “Time to Pretend” kept the festivities going strong. Flogging Molly was up next and kept the crowd screaming for more until Alanis Morisette took to the stage. Morisette’s set wasn’t bad, the crowd did sing along, but it did not have the oomph of the previous acts. The Kooks rounded up the first day of partying, taking the crowd through their first two albums in a high energy 90 minute set. 

Between Wednesday and Thursday, acts included The Presidents of the United States of America blasting their unique mix of grungy punk-rock out on the main stage, Hungarian death-metalists Al-Om blowing the crowd away with their performance on the Hammer World stage and a gypsy music parade rather like the Jazz parades of New Orleans. Kaiser Chiefs delivered a poor performance for the first half of their set but rescued their reputation halfway through, Jamiroquai made an appearance and Jay Kay took the crowd through a diverse range of past hits whilst giving fans their money’s worth of a show. On the World Music stage Mani Marley jammed out to a packed audience with hits like “Still Blazing”. 

On Friday the likes of The Cribs, Die Arzte, Roisin Murphy, Seri Tankian and the Sex Pistols took to the main stage with a vengeance, sending the crowd into a music induced euphoria. Some of the acts on the smaller stages included relaxed crowds taking in some Chicago Blues and Hungarians jazzing it up on another stage for avid listeners. Seri Tankian proved a great disappointment to many festival goers. Although his set was visually sound it lacked quite a bit of zest in the musical department. 

R.E.M closed off the festivities on Saturday night drawing a capacity crowd 70,000 strong and sold out signs were placed at the gates to the arena. Fans crammed themselves into the arena just to bear witness to a legendary band in recent musical history give the best performance of the entire festival.

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