A campingflight to Lowlands paradise

On the 19th till the 21th of August Mojo Concerts organized the 19^th edition of A camping flight to Lowlands paradise festival.  Lowlands is the biggest festival of the Netherlands with approximately 55.000 visitors all weekend. The first edition of Lowlands was in 1967 and since then it became the biggest festival of the Netherlands. On the recreation area of the theme park Six Flags in Biddinghuizen this  festival is being held.

The festival starts officially at Friday and has his last performance at Sunday night. The stages they have are named after the NATO alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Echo, Grolsch, India, Juliet, Lima, Mike, X-Ray, Tïtty Twïster and Lowlands Café. The biggest tent is the Alpha stage, this is where the main artists perform.

On Thursday you already can enter the camp side to build up your tent or park your caravan or camper. On this evening it’s already very crowded and to entertain the people they have the 24 hour tent. This is, like the name reveals, a stage where you can dance and drink all night long. The DJ’s who play the music in the 24hrs tent are several DJ’s who also perform during the festival. There is no line-up so you never know who will give you a good after party a full festival day.

The camp side doors open at noon to find a good spot to build up your tent or caravan. The 24 hour tent is also open and that’s also the reason why it’s so crowded! Because the festival terrain isn’t open yet everybody who’s already inside will make their first dance moves in the 24 hour tent. Until 7 am the die-hards will dance and will go to their tents or carvan. This night is a good starter to have a great three days festival.

Here we go! Lowlands opened its doors!

The enormous terrain looks fantastic. All those beautiful tents and stands, all those people ready to serve us, to entertain us, to make sure we are safe. Everybody has their own program in their head or iPhone app, everybody looks really excited! The sun is shining, this is going to be one hell of ride!

Many well known artists are performing today, combined with the new acts this Friday had a briliant program. Here are a few examples: Deus, Artic Monkeys, James Blake and Paul Kalkbrenner.

During the day people were dancing, laughing, drinking and eating in one of the many food stands. The choice of food was enormous, fresh prepared and sold by friendly personnel (mostly students).

When the festival ended at 05:00 o’clock, most people tried to find their place to sleep. For the people who never have enough, there was the 24 hours tent! This party went on untill 07:00 o’clock, now it was realy time to go to sleep. Another two days of party were waiting for us!

Oef! Waking up with a splitting headache in a camper that’s 45 degrees and full of people who are all feeling as F***ed up like I do. This is lowlands! After drinking a gallon of water and a quick shower we were ready to go to the festival grounds. The day started of with Zwart-licht XL at 13:30 in the Bravo, this is a dutch hip-hop formation with a band and a touch of dubstep beats. With 3 vocal background singers, a drummer, 2 guitarists, 2 MC’s and a DJ this was a great performance to start your day. A nice thing to mention is that at one point one of the background singer took the main stage for herself and did a couple of songs of her own. A warm twist in the show. Next thing on was AKS (Addicted Kru Sound) in the X-ray,this is a 5 headed band from Belgium with saxophone, guitars keys and electronics. This was allready pretty hyped cause they announced that Selah Sue was going to do a couple of songs with this dubstep, electro and breaks producing band. The X-Ray was going trough the roof with this live-dubstep playing band! The only downfall was that the X-ray was feeling like an Swedish sauna!  After re-hydrating for about a hour it was time for Goose! Goose is also a Belgian band with dance beats. Everybody was dancing and the vibe was great! At 8 o’clock it was Selah Sue her turn at the Alpha. So order your beer, roll your blunt and float away on the enchanting voice of Selah. It was a good show but her band wasn’t playing that great. After this we were of for some real dancing!  It was time for kenny harder (Joost van Bellen) and his protege’s Ferry Sherry and Donnie Longnite, a.k.a. the lowlands raveteam. If you know Joost van Bellen you know this was a great ender of this day.

The sunday of lowlands 2011 was the most busy one program wise. The last day is always the hardest and especially with a full program and 25 degrees during the day this was a hard one.

The Sunday started with fink. Fink had the honour to start at 11.30 am. Most of the 55.000 lowlands people was still waking up at that time which was ashame because Fink is a very good artist.  We started the day with royal republic in the india. A good band to wake up with; Swedish heavy metal straight up.  After royal republic we took a well deserved brake at one at the bars and eateries lowlands has and we headed to the alpha tent for the Roots. The roots did their upmost best but the show never took off. When you see the Roots in a smaller venue they can blow the place up  but this concert just didn’t. After the roots we went to odd future wolf gang kill them all. This hip hop group is said to be the next wu – tang clan but this was probably one of the worst shows we’ve seen on lowlands. Too bad because I’ve seen them in the melkweg and paradiso and they rocked the place! Straight after the odd future show we went to ‘ boef en de gelogeerde aap’. The x-ray tent was packed and they delivered. A great show with mad dubstep beats and a very talented MC.  We decided to grab a bite to eat at the Vietnamese shop before we headed over to kakkmaddafakka. This group from Norway with their background singers with boyband steps makes disco tunes. Easy to digest but not real high quality.  The titty twister is what it is from the movie from dusk till dawn; a filthy bikers bar but without the vampires. You can subscribe for a live performance with the titty twister band! But if you suck the risk is pretty high that you will get a beershower from the audience.  When we stepped out of the  titty twister the bravo was exploding because skrillex was doing his show. Skrillex isn’t dubstep but hardstep so the roof went off. Great show from the former frontman of a hardcore metalband. In the india tent they organized the superstijl party. Every 15 minutes you could vote on three different music styles. Girls against boys, fat dubsteprecords or oldskool hip hop party. The one with most votes got played by the DJ’s for 15 minutes.  Last up for the lowlands adventure was emalkay in the x-ray tent. This DJ from Birmingham teared up the tent.  His dubstep set without any breaks sucked the last energy out of the lowlands folks. A great festival with great people and a great atmosphere.