Rock Festival names

Sweden Rock Festival is a rock festival outside the town of Sölvesborg in Blekinge in southern Sweden. The festival offers the best possible mix of classic rock, hard rock, metal, blues and related genres. We also pay alot of attention to the overall festival experience, and our aim is to improve the level of comfort for our guests every year.

We not only present our audiences with the best music in the world, we also create a fantastic festival area with excellent service and hospitality. For instance, our five stages ensure that each artist gets a decent set length, while our guests always have different styles of music to choose from at any given time. Furthermore, we work hard to make sure that there are many different kinds of food offered to our visitors, while lines are kept to a minimum. We also offer clean, vacuum-flushing toilets instead of overfilled porta-potties, and when other festivals clean their grounds after their events are over, we have 200 people continuously making sure that our guests can enjoy sitting down on our grass slopes throughout the festival. And so on.

Over the years, we have built an organization of people who are in love with the music, know the festival by heart and are experts in their respective fields. This has given Sweden Rock Festival a reputation for being one of the best organized festivals in the world. Thanks to our magnificent audience, the festival has also become known as a calm, family-friendly event. Many see the good-natured, Sweden-Rock atmosphere as the festival's greatest trait.

In short, Sweden Rock Festival is a place where you don't have to worry about anything but relaxing and having a great time.

A short history

The seed to what today is one of the most well-renowned rock festivals in the world was planted in 1992, when the first festival saw the day of light under the name Sommarfestivalen (The Summer Festival), in the town Olofström. The thought at that time was to offer the audience classic rock, hard rock, folk music, blues and other genres that were not very common musical styles at festivals in Sweden back in those days. The first ever line-up was headlined by Nazareth and Wishbone Ash.

In 1993, the festival moved to the nearby city Karlshamn and changed its name to Karlshamn Rock Festival. During the years in Karlshamn the festival became more of a downright rock festival. Bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Sabbath (with Tony Martin on vocals), Bachman Turner Overdrive and Fleetwood Mac all played in Karlshamn between 1993 and 1997.

In 1998, when the festival had grown too big for the park in Karlshamn, it moved to the huge grass field by the Baltic Sea, outside the town Sölvesborg, where the festival still is located today. Even though it moved to a different town and county, the festival kept the name Karlshamn Rock Festival and the first year here saw bands like Blue Öyster Cult, Status Quo, Simple Minds (!) and Dee Snider gracing the stages.

In 1999, the festival finally changed its name to Sweden Rock Festival. The focus on hard rock and metal got even clearer, with bands like Manowar, Mercyful Fate and Motörhead in the line-up.

In 2001, the festival got new management. Since then it has grown steadily, and today it is one of the most important rock and metal festivals in the world with 33000 annual visitors from more than 50 different countries. Acts like Kiss, Black Sabbath, Guns 'n ' Roses, Rush, Judas Priest, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, Accept, Alice Cooper, Soundgarden, Mötley Crüe, Scorpions, Volbeat, ZZ Top, Sabaton and In Flames have all played at Sweden Rock over the years.