Swiss Rolls, and rocks
Monday July 27, 2009 - Email this article to a friend

The Paleo Festival in Switzerland had The Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, Placebo, The Prodigy and many others playing this year. 250,000 tickets were sold and PlanetSKI was there.

It’s the biggest outdoor music festival in Switzerland and attracts crowds from across Europe. But very few British people have even heard of it.

Perhaps the British media concentrates too much on home-grown festivals like Glastonbury, the V-Festival and the Isle of Wight.

It started off 30 years ago as a Folk Festival in the town of Nyon, just along the lake from Geneva.

It was held in Colovray meadow by the shore and attracted a modest 1,800 people.

Now it occupies an 84-hectare site just outside Nyon and has seen the likes of The Who, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, REM, Lou Reed, Nigel Kennedy, BB King and Patti Smith play in recent years.

Kaiser Chiefs in full flowAs well as the The Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, Placebo and The Prodigy, mentioned in the introduction, there was Moby, Tracy Chapman, Fat Boy Slim and Amy Macdonald this year.

There was the French singer-songwriter, Francis Cabrel, with The Young Gods and singer Sophie Hunger among the top Swiss acts.

The organisers called this years musical talent "a dream line-up."

It goes on for 6 days and dwarfs many of the other major European festivals.

It sells out pretty much as soon as the tickets go on sale, but in the UK many people have never heard of it.

It is a peculiarly Swiss affair and, as you may imagine, is very well organised.

Organised festival camping Swiss style Festival camping, Swiss styleThe tents are pitched in neat rows, cordoned off with white tape on the ground and organised on a grid system with street names too.

The toilets are not only clean but also of the flushing variety.

There are hot showers and plentiful supplies of good quality food.

You can take your own alcohol into the main arena and you are not subjected to long queues and searches as the Swiss don’t tend to throw glass bottles or stab each other at these sort of events.

The terrorist threat in neutral Switzerland is small too.

In the past three decades 2,258 artists have performed to a total audience of 4,326,154 people.

There have been 2,664 individual performances.

Every festival needs some mudThere the usual 'alternative' acts and sideshows inlcuding a rather strange mud bath just in case you are missing Glastonbury-like conditions, though it ended up raining heavily half way through the festival and strong winds rocked many a tent.

Though off course they had been put up efficiently and most remained rooted firmly to the ground depite the strom like conditons that had the organisers worried.

There's also a rather upmarket stand with VIP booths for the posh people who only come for the music and then head back to their hotels for a good night's sleep.

So why is it called The Paléo Festival?

Paléo was the name of a successful racehorse and in 1975 became the name of a Nyon-based cultural association involved in organising concerts.

The Festival then adopted the name in 1983.

For a personal view and blog on this year’s event see the blog of our content editor, James Cove.

For a review of a concert by Iggy Pop at the Caprices Festival a few years ago in the ski resort of Crans Montana, see here.

For more information see www.paleo.ch and also check out the pictures below.

These really are the festival toilets