Muddy Successful Paleo

Switzerland’s biggest festival had another successful year, selling all 230,000 tickets and reinforcing the idea that European festivalgoers can handle a little mud – or even quite a lot of it.

Continuing from such UK festivals as Glastonbury and T In The Park, Denmark’s Roskilde, and Germany’s Southside Festival, Paleo-Nyon got hit hard by wet weather and the subsequent effects it had on the festival site.

“We had 75 percent of the average rainfall for July in the space of four days,” explained Paleo press chief Christophe Platel, having checked through meteorological records going back 85 years.

It rained heavily three days before the July 19-24 event opened, while heavy trucks were still bringing equipment to the site.

Platel says Paleo-Nyon is such a tradition that it sells most of its tickets within two days of the onsale. From time to time, being covered in mud has been part of that tradition.

He believes it also has a democratising effect because all people are truly equal when they’re covered in mud.

“All of the 1,500 tickets we put on sale each day of the festival were sold, and so people still wanted to come,” he said.

Some of the car parks were too muddy to be used and drivers were diverted to the nearby town of Nyon, which had regular shuttle busses to and from the festival site.

The poignant note was that Amy Winehouse, who canceled Paleo along with the rest of her European dates, died a few hours before she had at one time been scheduled to go onstage at the festival.

Her picture and background information were in the first edition of the festival programme, the one sent as courtesy to the event’s sponsors and partners.

The acts helping a sold-out Paleo-Nyon have a muddy good time included Jack Johnson, The Strokes, James Blunt, The Chemical Brothers, Robert Plant, Portishead, PJ Harvey, Patrice and The National.