Day one of Roskilde Festival 2008 presented one of the weakest programs in modern times, but the weather – something you always have to mention when it comes to this festival and Denmark in the summer – was amazing, in fact completely diametrical to last years horribly rainy Thursday. A day that most likely has to take quite a lot of the blame for the fact that Roskilde08 is quite far from being sold out with just 66.000 tickets sold out of 75.000. And with that out of the way, we now move on to what it’s really about, the music.

Faroese singer-songwriter, Teitur (Photo by kind permission of Carsten Snejbjerg/RockPhoto), had been awarded the honor of opening the main stage, Orange, and that wasn’t the best choice. That stage is just too big for Teitur’s beautifully alluring, fragile universe. A somewhat surprisingly big, but in front of Orange seemingly small, crowd of approximately 20.000 people had made their way to the concert and they were treated to a mix of songs mainly from his last two albums, ‘Stay Under The Stars’ (2006) and ‘The Singer’ (2008), executed pleasingly loose by the impressive number of musicians that took the stage on and off during the show. Teitur is really something out of the ordinary, but that doesn’t change the fact that this concert would have been so much better at one of the smaller tent-stages.

One alternative could have been the Astoria stage, where Finnish/French duo, The Dø (pronounced “The Doh” and based on the first note in the standard scale, Do-Re-Mi etc.), entertained a packed tent with their folk-inspired alternative poprock from the debut, ‘A Mouthful’ (2008). There’s been a bit of a hype surrounding Olivia B.Merilahti and Dan Levy and that can be understood. They do write great songs (‘Playground Hustle’, ‘The Bridge Is Broken’, ‘At Last’) and the compelling talent of singer Olivia is definitely one for the books (… and she’s quite hot too) – and then it’s always impressing when three people (they had a drummer with them) can fill out a stage in a tent that holds a few thousand people.

Post Scriptum: See more pictures and buy your favorites at RockPhoto, the official Roskilde Festival photographers.