Sweden Rock In Rush For 2013

Sweden Rock missed out on its ninth successive sellout, but event organiser Ingolf Persson wasn’t too bothered as the 33,000-capacity festival was only a few hundred short.

“It was a little harder this year and the tickets didn’t go as quickly,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the economic crisis making people hold on to their money a little longer or because there weren’t so many acts to choose from.”

If the overall billing wasn’t seen as being as strong as the previous years, Persson believes he’s already solved that problem for 2013 by securing what will be Rush’s only festival performance on next year’s world tour. It will be the band’s first European festival show in 33 years.

Although Sweden Rock regularly sells out or comes very close to it, Persson says he’s not tempted to increase the capacity of the site on the southern Baltic coast at Solvesborg.

Like many European festivals staged over the June 7-9 weekend, Sweden Rock started with wet weather and a forecast of even worse to come.

It didn’t turn out that way, and a welcome appearance from the sun made the last three days of the event what Persson described as “plain sailing.”

Apart from the festival’s three main days, the warm-up day June 16 – which is run without the main stage – attracted 15,000 for a bill that included Fear Factory, Edguy, Doomed and a strong lineup of mainly Swedish rock and metal acts.

The main headliners for Sweden Rock were Motley Crue, Soundgarden, and Twisted Sister, supported by a bill that included Lynyrd Skynyrd, Motorhead, Bad Company, Sebastian Bach, The Darkness, Mastodon, Blue Oyster Cult, Gotthard, Danko Jones, and Gamma Ray.