Paaspop is one big celebration of the return of the summer festivals

Corona fear? This seems to have been completely displaced with the start of the festival season. Would you like to get used to the crowds? Anyone who walks through the entrance gates of Paaspop on Good Friday will no longer have time to acclimatize.

Because in Schijndel in Brabant, the party goes from the parking lot to the Apollo, the largest tent. If you take the walking route in between and want to see everything, you have to stop more often than ever. This is because the Molenheide festival site is more fully built than in previous years. As if the organization communicates non-verbally: “We have been forced to be quiet for two seasons, now we are going to party on every square centimeter too!”

Food at star level

New this year include the Oase, an outdoor terrace including a stage, and restaurant Tuin der Lusten, where you can eat at star level. However, a large part of the public prefers what they have missed so much; the guitars in the Jack Daniels, Thunder Alley or Thunderbolt, or the headliners in the biggest tent. This year, no fewer than 18,000 spectators will fit in there. It’s not yet full with Rolf Sanchez and Guus Meeuwis, the first acts of the weekend. Well afterwards, with Anouk, whose performances are rare. In Schijndel, unlike the rest of the first day, the show of the singer from The Hague is not about bells, whistles and entertainment. In a sober, intimate setting she lets her voice do all the work, improvising but emotionally.

A golden voice can also be heard in the smaller Roxy; that of Sigourney K. The young singer scored a huge hit with her contribution to the song ‘Vlucht Strip’ by Kriss Kross Amsterdam, who have made their trademark by sampling well-known house melodies from the 1990s. But she also knows how to touch the other songs she plays, with a DJ and four dancers as accompaniment. The mix of sweet R&B, heavy drums from the trap genre, well-known pop melodies and her fine voice is contagious. There aren’t many people on her show, but those who have walked into the Roxy may have seen a superstar in the making.

pinball machines

But Paaspop does not only excel in booking performances with razor sharp sharpness. “Actually, I don’t come for specific artists,” says ‘grandma Hanneke’ (67), who comes to the festival site with granddaughter Mara (16). “Each tent has a unique atmosphere and its own genre and you can often play fun games in between.” This year she will also get her money’s worth. Visitors can literally take a bath, play various pinball machines or channel their inner racing driver in a mini go-kart race. Visitors are short of eyes. Here a blinded city bus is about to bounce through a mob rushing towards Dutch-speaking squatters, and there you can play an escape game in a caravan.

Everywhere you look small parties are born, which together form one big celebration of the return of the summer festivals. That people wanted to experience that starting signal can be seen early on the first day in the packed Disco Snolly tent, in the middle of the site. There the first DJ, Barend van de Louw aka Boogiefever, starts a party at four in the afternoon that never seems to stop. As he digs through his vinyl singles to finally nail down The Jackson 5’s apt “I Want You Back,” an elderly couple perfectly sums up what they’ve missed about music festivals in two words: “There are.”