What can I say? It was great as always but somehow I started feeling my years, They are not that many but for the young students I must seem like an ancient wreck.
Friday started of early with too much red wine at Byggplatsen (The Building Site) where all floats for Saturdays parade are constructed. Every SOF a song has been choosen to be that years bygglåt (Building song). This song is played end to end during the light part of the day, every day, starting two or three weeks prior to SOF as a bevolent curse on the builders. For us oldtimers it’s a natural starting point for the festivities seeing the nearly finished floats and listening to bygglåten for the first few times. Well, it didn’t turn out that way this year. For some reason they manage to break the loudspeakers just before we arrived so we missed it. Bummer. 
From byggplatsen we went to Folkets Park, a fenced in festival area with several stages for the orchestras to play on. And from too much wine I switched over to too much beer mode. I had a great friday being stupendously drunk and doing some dancing whenever an orchestra played a good tune or there was a pretty girl to dance with nearby. Unfortunately the night ended early since I somehow got equally studendously tired. At two o’clock in the morning I crawled home to sleep.
Saturday didn’t exactly start as well. For some reason I woke up at 6 o’clock in the morning and I couldn’t get back to sleep. Bummer! Add a truly magnificent hang-over to that and you can guess how the rest of the day went. A friend of mine who stayed over for the festival and I draged our damaged caracasses down to Trägårdsföreningen for Sillfrukost, i.e. pickled herring breakfast which traditionally includes snaps. I neither ate nor drank any feeling a bit sorry for myself. I’m really getting to old for this.
At 13:00 the parade started with us oldtimers up front selling programmes to the masses and finally sitting down a Stora Torget and wathcing the rest of the parade go by. After the parade we gatherer near Folkets Park to drink beer and mingle with other oldtimers. By this time I had had enough of water so I had a beer with the rest. It’s great meeting old and new friends again. Having arranged a festival like this truly brings people together. And one of the great things about SOF is that it brings people together from different years; it doesn’t matter if you arranged SOF in 1991, 1997 or 2005 you are all best buddies swapping stories about what was great or what went wrong with this or that festival.
At 18:00 we, SOF-97 that is, had a dinner to celebrate that it was ten years since we arranged SOF. We managed to gather over 20 people which is about half of those involved. Not bad after ten years. Of course some had children with them, others had babysitters to go home to and there were also several pregnant women among us so some left early. The rest of us hit the festival after dinner. I had some wine to go with the food and it still left me feeling queasy so for the rest night I stuck to water, mostly.
I spent a large part of the evening at the Karaoke tent supporting friends who sang. Since I am completely tone deaf I wouldn’t inflict my singing voice (or is that noise) on anyone. After an hour or two Karaoke got stale and we moved on to greener pastures. I got a feeling that there are fewer students in the different student orchestras this year something that was evident in the parade but also on the various stages in Folkets Park. I must say I liked the norwegian Funk Factory but the sound technichians didn’t impress me much. They seemed to rely heavily on compressing the sound and thus eliminating dynamics and clarity. Listening to Funk Factory was like being hit with a solid wall of sound yet you could hear the song and instruments but not as well as you should have been able too. I would have loved if they had added som clarity to the lead singer instead of drowning her among the instruments. As far as I could tell she had a really good voice. There were several great acts but I am partial to Lithe Blås (and Lithe Grås) as well as Lusen Big Band.I was told that Attraktionsorkestern was really good but didn’t hear them myself.
What bummed me out was the lack of audience. It is a long weekend and many have probably gone home to their folks for the weekend but still. The students of today doesn’t seem to get how big an event this is, they treat it as just another party and stays home to warm up until 23-23:30. After that Folkets Park is full but they missed many great gigs. It is always a little bit sad to see an orchestra giving their all for an audience of five or ten. I can only hope that the students are more into it in two years time at SOF 2009. Wherever that will be since Folkets Park is being torn down to give room for new housing. Let’s hope Christer, the unsung hero of Linköping University, gets his way and that there will be a freshly built SOF-villa at the University with a surrounding area for festivals like this one and smaller events like München Hoben.
Hi again, seems like a full weekend! Did you meet anyone from our “generation”?
Posted by Vickan on May 20th, 2007