There’s only one way for the serious music journalist, sent out to a serious music festival to review serious music for a serious music magazine, to start the day - and that is to fish.

Real men fish, I prefer to watch someone who eerily looks like Super Mario try to fish, only to break one rod and fail to use the cast release on the other (that might not be what it’s called but I did, for a short time, edit a fishing magazine). It is all the fun of Roskilde - a music festival where you don’t actually have to know there’s music going on to have plenty to do.

When it comes to music though, Roskilde is amongst the best for knowing its roots despite increasing international popularity. With a host of Scandinavian bands on the line-up, it would be rude to pass up the possibility of turning up some gems from the dust.

Following my day four blog post, I made my way over to the only open stage, Pavilion Junior, to sample the wonderfully named The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. From Copenhagen, the six piece started life supporting Amy Winehouse when she played our host nation’s capital. They also look like they could crack the foreign market, but only in a quirky Aqua type of way (as an aside, I heard that Aqua raised Denmark’s GDP by 5% in the 90s). The sugary sweet front woman Mette Lindberg pops and jumps and squeaks around to a soundtrack reminiscent of Morcheeba. It’s good for a dance, but Danes have done danceable pop a lot better in the past, and will continue so into the future.

One of these bands is Tiger Tunes, who are something of a not so guilty pleasure of Bearded’s second reporter in the dust fields of Roskilde. Frontman KR Hansen is shared with not so similar side project Beta Satan, who take the pop edge of Tiger Tunes and layer it under a heavy rock psyche. The result is quite brilliant, in a festival live sort of way. Ferocious guitars and rather splendid vocal segues such as “rape a face” going into “I’m not your pet you fucking cunt”, make it by far the most pleasurable set of pre-’proper’-programming before the full arena opened on day five.

When the arena did open up, there really wasn’t much to do but continue where I had left off. So it was The Dø (pronounced ‘dough’ I’m not so reliably informed) who introduced me to the Astoria stage. The international aspect of the festival meant that the Finnish/French duo spoke in broken English, all well and good if you want to be entertained by rather bizarre comments like “this is dedicated to everyone… err… with shoulders,” and the retort “everyone with shoulders say ‘hey’”.

Of course everybody in the rather packed tent cheers rapturously, and in keeping with what seems to be the Scandinavian way, the band keep the crowd entertained with more pop rock. They close up with a disappointing cover of Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’, which simply slows it all down - quite like what Mark Ronson would probably do, only without the trumpets.

But the first big draw are the recently independent Radiohead on the Orange Stage. There are no surprises as Thom and co. hold their cards close to their chest. It starts off slowly and barely gets out of third gear as what is an elaborate (or not that elaborate) dress rehearsal takes place. Whilst watching, I wrote a long rambling dissection of the band’s relevance in music today, comparing my reaction to watching the band play material predominantly from an average record at Glastonbury in 2003 to watching the band play material predominantly from an average record at Roskilde this year. Prior to both sets I was indifferent, but whilst I can away enthralled and excited five years ago, I came away indifferent this time around.

Bearded picks, day 6
1800 - Vieux Farka Touré (Modiba)
2000 - Sunburned Hand of the Man (Smalltown Supersound)
2100 - Mogwai (Wall of Sound)
2200 - CocoRosie (Touch and Go)
2300 - Holy Fuck (Young Turks)
0000 - Battles (Warp)
0100 - Yeasayer (We are Free)
0200 - Motorpsycho (Stickman)