Don’t trust these nice Haldern Pop people! These friendly helpers who are recruited from the entire village of Rees-Haldern. Those frolicking “pop brats,” so called by the festival itself. These creative villagers who, with a mixture of joy and business acumen, spoil the audience with ice cream, rolls, Aperol or a roadside shower. These festival organizers who, now in their 39th year, ensure that people with large record collections and/or a curiosity for music are interested in spending a long weekend in this green region on the Lower Rhine. You can’t fucking trust all these people! Because: That’s how they get you! Lure you into the trap, ensnare you – until you feel safe, relaxed and secure. And then it crashes into you: that one band that smashes you in the forehead like a club. That one band that shatters your worldview. This one band that suddenly gets you – the “three-chord friend”, the “guitar and voice is enough for me” person – moving with the purest, exhausting, driving jazz, although your body doesn’t even know how on earth want him to move to this music. And then follows the “walk of shame” to your caravan and to your friends who are mourning the Britpop hype and ask with wide eyes: “You also listen to jazz now? Are you crazy?”
Haldern Pop 2022: No simple crowdpleasing…
Forgive the somewhat flowery introduction. But this year’s Haldern made one thing clear with almost stoic determination: simple crowdpleasing is not his thing. And that despite the fact that Haldern is one of the chillest festival experiences you can have every summer. At least as far as the trappings are concerned. The audience is deeply relaxed, nice and enthusiastic at the right moments. The artwork, the organisation, the location, the program points reaching into the place – everything is so smooth that you can only take your hat off to it. If only it weren’t for the line-up that this year – more than ever – focused on challenging music in the best sense of the word. Alex Rice, singer of the formidable London post-punk band Sports Team, put it in a nutshell on Thursday on the Spiegelzelt stage: “We have some very crass bands from the UK avant-garde here in the backstage and in the line-up. scene seen. Pretty far off stuff! It’s a great festival! Pretty niche, isn’t it?” The answer was: loud cheers, a lively moshpit. crowd surfing That can probably be seen as approval in all respects.
A similar scene that speaks for itself could be seen later in the evening with the Sons Of Kemet, who are currently on a kind of farewell tour because the band around Shabaka Hutchings is too busy to continue in this construct for the time being (drummer Tom Skinner, for example, wants concentrate on working with The Smile first). There were five particularly cheerful examples of the local village youth standing in front of the stage, all in colorful shirts, with a sweet-smelling sports cigarette circling around and simply couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Two drummers, tenor saxophone and tuba and these four jazz musicians rocked more than any rock band they had seen before?! Once one of the guys hugged his buddy, grinning broadly and shouted: “Dude, that drummer is so tight!” Claas Relotius couldn’t have come up with a better idea for a Haldern follow-up report.
… Unless you say hello to the Beatsteaks
Nevertheless, something else was also evident on Thursday: every now and then a band with stage pig qualities and a direct line to the audience is really cool. If you hadn’t thought beforehand that the Beatsteaks would have the demanding crowd in the bag so much that even the people who had come for Sons of Kemet and Badbadnotgood would throw their arms in the air, bawl, celebrate for an hour and a half , pogo and end up drenched in sweat moving to the next gig. Friday could have used something like this with the all great main stage acts Curtis Harding, Anna Calvi and Shortparis. On the other hand, these gigs were also so tight, dramaturgically superior and musically stunning that it’s hard to complain. Above all, Calvi, who has geared her stage show completely to the guitar goddess, is simply good to kneel down – friendly banter with the audience would somehow not have fit.
As always, it is difficult to summarize the past few days in a text like this. Too many discoveries, too many “WTF moments”, too often this feeling of having arrived that you can feel at good festivals. And of course: too many gigs that you missed because you can’t split into quarters, the campsite company is nice at the moment, or the hot temperatures and the wine spritzers and the early-on-Sunday-train-must-have to skip the band you really wanted to see – Wet Leg. Because – what sadism – they are the last band to play in the Spiegelzelt on Saturday at 1:30 am. So here are a few scenes that better describe what haldering can feel like.
Three of many beautiful scenes from Haldern
Friday noon, Haldern Pop Bar in Rees. You sit at a reading. Eric Pfeil – musician, author and columnist for colleagues from Rolling Stone – reads from his great book “Azzurro: With 100 Songs through Italy”. Reading doesn’t go far enough: Eric wraps them all up, throws out bon mots and fun facts about Italian pop music, alludes to classics and the obscure. Then to the ice cream parlor two doors down: three scoops in a cup. Stracciatella, strawberry and, of course, azzurro. Back to the Haldern Pop Bar, order an Aperol Spritz and then happily swam to the Italians from Extraliscio. The sun is pounding, the cold Aperol is crackling under your skull. Half an hour later you’re sitting in the church, listening to the string-guitar-bass ensemble of Stargaze for half an hour, before the choir Cantus Domus and 1000 Robota join in and celebrate a small power station mass for another half hour. At the end, the whole church, the choir, the band sings reverently: “Drive, drive, drive on the Autobahn.” Two hours later you’re standing in the mirror tent, at 45 degrees without a sauna towel and banging along to the art punk – Enthusiasts by Gustaf from Brooklyn. How does it all fit together? Somehow not at all, but somehow yes.
Saturday early afternoon. The main stage will open soon. Spent the morning at the lake or on the meadow next to it in the shade. Best idea at 32 degrees. Great people, halfway cold wine spritzer, the farm next door sells grilled food and cold drinks. You can stroll past the site completely relaxed. Then suddenly another notorious Haldern moment: On the main stage, in the blazing sun, it’s not relaxed, poetic folk that would fit the mood, but the noise of the Horse Lords from Baltimore. Instrumental, brutal, ingenious, avant-garde rock that saws your forehead open – which you don’t look at closely because you realize that the festival is already further along than you are. But then, an hour later, you’re ready for reconciliation with one Wine spritzer before Anaïs Mitchell. Wonderful voice, poetic lyrics, charismatic folk that crawls right into your heart. The Haldern years are briefly remembered, when some in the audience complained that the line-up was “too quiet and too folky”. Apparently you were heard.
Friday night: Today you want to hold out! The legs are already shaky, it’s terribly late. Can you make it to Black Midi who will close the tent at 2.45? Then you meet great concert buddies that you haven’t seen for a long time, chat in the wine bar in front of the tent, make it to Black Midi thanks to the good conversations, feel blissful – and fall into the trap again: because Black Midi are them loudest, wildest, best, coolest, most exhausting, most diabolical band of the weekend. The lower jaw drops onto the chest, the ears whistle, the brain races when the question arises as to how these youngsters can get so good and sound sick. Distraught, you crawl into your sleeping bag and dream of “hell fire”, which they sing about and conquer on their current album “Hellfire”.
That’s probably how this weekend felt for many visitors*, even if you heard a few voices saying that the big, forgiving Haldern moments in front of the main stage were missing, that it was too much jazz or too much post-punk or too much lots of poetry and heavy words at Kae Tempest’s headlining gig. You can understand that too, but Haldern Pop has certainly been around for so long because they’ve always had their own ideas about the line-up and keep making it clear what was initially said here: You can’t trust these people! You will never create the festival 1:1 that you imagined in the frenzy of anticipation. And that’s exactly why inspire more lasting.
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