Koopmans’ Fairytale Festival

It will be called Tinderbox, named after one of the Danish writer’s best-known fairytales.

Koopmans, who is running the event with his Danish Northside Festival partner Brian Nielsen and Copenhagen-based promoter Mads Sorensen, has found a 74-hectare site on the outskirts of the city at a place called The 1,000 Year Forest.

Although the city’s tourist business depends heavily on the spinning of fairytales, Nielsen tells Pollstar that Odense – Denmark’s third-largest city behind Copenhagen and Aarhus – was keen to attract the new outdoor. The site is between the city’s largest open-air public baths and the Odense Adventure Golf Course. It’s about a ten-minute drive from Odense Airport, which is also named after Hans Christian Andersen.

Next year’s debut festival is scheduled for June 26-28, one week before Denmark’s Roskilde Festival, but the timing appears to have been fixed to slot alongside the German promoter’s Bravalla Festival in Sweden.

In two years Bravalla has become Sweden’s biggest festival and in June did more than 56,000 per day. The plan looks to be to twin Bravalla with Tinderbox, in the same way as Koopmans’ FKP Scorpio twins its Hurricane and Southside festivals in Germany, offering two slots at festivals with 50,000-plus capacities on the same weekend.

Nielsen says he’d be happy to see 30,000 per day in the first year, making it similar in size to the 35,000-capacity Northside Festival that Koopmans and Nielsen launched in Aarhus in 2010.

“We’re not shooting for 50,000 in the first year, but we are shooting for top acts,” Nielsen explained, admitting the longer-term aim is to fully use the site’s 50,000-capacity potential.