GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The schedule and prices for trains during the Paleo Festival in Nyon are now out.
The CFF rail company’s RailAway plan offers 20 percent off on travel, to help reduce road bottlenecks and pollution created by the 230,000 music fans who descend on Nyon 19-24 July.
Sample prices: second class with a half-fare card, from Geneva CHF6.80, from Lausanne CHF13, from Fribourg CHF26.40.
The shuttle bus between the station and the festival grounds is free of charge.
Special night trains, one an hour in each direction, will run starting at 01:30, to Geneva and to Lausanne-Montreux.
Buses serving the region will be waiting for the trains. A special train to Fribourg is being added that leaves at 02:30, arriving shortly before 04:00.
Train tickets are available at CFF rail stations (windows and machines),via internet on the CFF Ticketshop and by phone, at Rail Service: 0900 300 300 (CHF 1.19/min from fixed line phones).
Source: Paleo, ©2011 Paleo / Kiyoungmi Kim
NYON, SWITZERLAND – The Paleo Festival in Nyon is taking Amy Winehouse’s cancellation in stride as it looks for a last-minute star fill-in to replace the singer who signed on, to much fanfare, 11 April. Winehouse’s comeback European tour, after a long fight with drugs and alcohol, was off to a painful start this week in Belgrade, Serbia, and within a day the entire tour had been cancelled.
Winehouse was booed and jeered at the Belgrade concert where, according to a number of media reports backed up by film footage, she appeared to be too drunk to perform, despite strict post-rehab instructions not to touch alcohol. Her staff reportedly has instructions to get rid of any alcohol it finds.
The BBC reports that “many had paid up to €45 (£40) to see her in a country in which wages are some of the lowest in Europe, and their anger was clear.” The Daily Mail reported 21 June that her management says the singer will not ask to be paid for the Belgrade show.
The announcement that the tour was cancelled was gentler, and Paleo as well as some of her other concert venues has picked up the tone, noting that “Amy Winehouse is withdrawing from all scheduled performances. Everyone involved wishes to do everything they can to help her return to her best and she will be given as long as it takes for this to happen. Paléo addresses this talented artist their best wishes.”
The tickets for her Nyon gig will not be refunded, as per Paleo policy. The festival says it will announce her replacement as soon as one is found.
Mad rush for tickets: Tuesday 13 April
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland’s largest open-air music festival promises another 5 days of hot music 19-24 July 2011, as it has done every summer for the past 35 years,
The lineup has now been announced and includes: Jack Johnson, James Blunt, The Chemical Brothers, The Strokes, Robert Plant, Portishead, PJ Harvey, Eddy Mitchell, Jamel, Jean-Louis Aubert, Cali, Katerine, Patrice and The National.
The guest of honour this year is the Caribbean for the Village du Monde, so expect some warm beats, with a range of flavours from the region.
The detailed music lineup is now on the Paleo site. Tickets can be purchased online or at outlets listed on the site, but plan ahead to queue for the tickets, which disappear very rapidly every year.
The 2011 poster competition was wone by Kyoungmi Kim, a graphic artist and third-year student at the Geneva High School for Art and Design (Head).
The competition is organized jointly by Paléo and the University of Applied Science of Western Switzerland (HES-SO).
Kim said of her winning design, “I didn’t want to go the way of over-serious abstract graphics. It seemed important to highlight the festive dimension of the event.”
Dizu Plaatjie, Paleo 2010 (photo: ©2010 Patrick Lee Thorp/Paleo)
Paleo goes back to its roots with Crosby, Stills & Nash
Festival beats the World Cup with its own Southern Africa lineup, headed by white Zulu Clegg
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Tickets go on sale for reduced prices starting at midday 21 April, online, for the next Paleo Festival.
And the lineup is now out, featuring some old favourites and hot new talent: Indochine, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jacques Dutronc, Iggy and the Stooges, M, Jamiroquai, NTM, Alain Souchon, N*E*R*D, Diam’s, Johnny Clegg.
Don’t forget to enter the competition for free tickets to the six-day festival, one of the liveliest events of the Lake Geneva region summer!
Paleo 2009
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The largest open-air music festival in Switzerland, Paleo, may go smoke free.
Smoking will be banned in certain areas during the 2010 festival, Philippe Vallat, Paleo’s executive director, told 24 Heures in an interview.
Vallat and Daniel Rossellat, head of the Paleo Music Festival, told the newspaper they must comply with canton Vaud’s ban on smoking in public areas.
Swiss traffic jam, autoroute, 2009: doubling up might help
Update 16:25 Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Paleo Festival Nyon is well and truly over for this year, and we all had very good fun. The festival’s organizers tried even harder this year to encourage public transportation, as GenevaLunch described in its users’ guide to the festival.
Among those efforts was Klaxonne.com, an experiment in “dynamic ride-sharing“, bringing together demand and supply for a ride to a certain place at a certain time, using text messages or sms. Klaxonne was moderately successful at Paleo.
Meditating in the mud - Photo, Jared Bloch
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Natural skin defoliation? Spiritual cleansing? Or just plain dirty fun? According to one young mud bather interviewed by GenevaLunch, “It’s just mud. That’s all.”
Paleo revelers were invited to take a dip in a mud pool set up in the center of the Mangroove art installation. Mangroove, a virtual swamp of passageways constructed from lengths of mangrove limbs, is a joint project between Paleo and the Haute ecole spécialisée de Suisse occidentale (HES) (University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland).
Santigold brings Brooklyn to Paleo
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Not Fancy but Funky, Funny, and Fun. This was a summary of the Santigold show Saturday night at Paleo.
Santigold, a Brooklyn, New York native, has discovered what those other kings of kitsch from the borough, the Beastie Boys, found out 20 years ago; chutzpah is cooler than gangsta’.
Private banker by day, Hip Hop fan by night arriving at Paleo
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Amidst Paleo’s 35,000 concert goers on Friday, I met a private banker who had come straight to the festival from the Geneva airport, hoping to catch some of the Hip Hop acts.
“In fact, I was hoping to see NTM [the French rap group Nic Ta Mere] but the lead singer is still under arrest, so they are cancelled,” the Swiss banker, Damian told me.
Damian, who lived and worked in India, was upbeat when I shared with him the lineup for the evening including a Bhangra performance and South African Hip Hop.
Achanak welcomed concert-goers on Friday night with their dance-friendly mix of Bhangra and electro music.
Achanak's irresistable dance rhythms - photo, Jared Bloch
Unbridled energy with La Pulquería at Paleo 09 © Paleo Festival 2009
Paleo Festival Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The crowd at Paleo couldn’t keep up with La Pulqueria Friday 24 July. The energy level on the stage was reminiscent of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern – well, when it works – and lead singer Huracán Romántica exhorted the crowd in very passable French to dance, to DANCE. He even went into the crowd and gave people liberal shots of tequila from a bottle in an effort to get them fired up.
Paleo cup washing operation. © Paleo Festival Nyon 2009
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Last year, festival-goers to the Paleo Festival Nyon discarded 1.2 million plastic cups in six days. Drinks, hot and cold were sold in cups that ended up in the garbage, or more likely on the ground. The festival’s organizers decided that things had to change.
Enter Ecocup, a French company. For the 2009 edition of Paleo, Ecocup is supplying the festival’s 52 bars with 100,000 clean, reusable, plastic cups a day with the Paleo logo on them. When you buy a drink at Paleo this year, you pay a CHF2 deposit on the cup, returnable at any of the bars. Observant visitors will see some of the 80 workers, most of them part of the Paleo volunteer workforce, processing the cups on the way in on the left, about 100 metres before the main entrance.
GenevaLunch spoke to Ecocup’s David Arnaud Friday 24 July.
Paleo crowd arriving on Thursday evening - Photo, Jared Bloch
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Fans enjoyed unexpectedly sunny weather Thursday evening at Paleo, in spite of intermittent showers earlier in the day. Apart from a few soggy patches at the concert sites, shows went on without a hitch, and the extra plastic sacs and rain gear packed in, went unused.
Mexican virtuosos Rodrigo and Gabriela set the tone for the evening, with a near hour-long guitar duel featuring their own material as well as covers of “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Oye Como Va.” See GL’s Paleo Photo Album
A passageway to India via Nyon - Photo Jared Bloch
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - If your vacation itinerary doesn’t include a trip to India this year, consider a visit to the Paleo Festival. As part of its offerings, the Nyon based festival is highlighting Indian culture, music, crafts and food this year.
For your passage to India, take the train to Nyon and then the local train. Direction: St Cergue (see GL tips in ”Practical guide to Nyon’s Paleo Festival,” and see GL’s Paleo Photo Album).
The crowd arriving in Nyon on the 17:00 train on Wednesday left no doubt about the tremendous following Paleo has accrued during the past 30 years. In addition to the range of Indian musicians performing on Wednesday 23 July, an array of musical talent from pop/rock dance favorites Franz Ferdinand, to Bonaparte, billed as an “international cabaret burlesque rock show,” and Quebecois Chanteuse Pascale Picard, was on display.
Paleo crowd, 2009
What it is: The largest outdoor music festival in Switzerland, started in 1976, with over 4.3 million concert-goers since then. In 2008, the audience was 227,000 strong, and there were 146 performances on six stages.
Volunteers, all 4,062 of them, helped to make the experience a great one for all. According to a survey in 2008, 59 percent of concert-goers came from the Lake Geneva region.
Title: Paleo music festival
Location: Nyon, Vaud
Link out: Click here
Description: Every year, more than 120 concerts are staged for more than 200,000 spectators in the 84-hectare Asse site, near Nyon. See GL’s Paleo Photo Album and the rest of GenevaLunch’s coverage of the Paleo Festival.
Start Date: 21 Jul 2009
End Date: 26 Jul 2009
© Paleo Festival
Vernier, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Major sports and cultural events draw 9 million people each year in Switzerland and can have an important negative impact on the environment, says the Swiss section of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), in a report released 24 June. Events such as Nyon’s Paleo Festival and the ski marathon in Engadin, canton Grisons, make a concerted effort to reduce that impact, the report says. They encourage public transport to the venue, use power from renewable sources, provide bio-degradable containers for food, and bio foods among other things. Other events that come at the top of the list of the ecologically-minded are the St. Gallen Openair, the Lucerne marathon, and the OrangeCinema in Bern, Basel, and Zurich. The Orange openair cinema in Geneva’s Genève-Plage area was not evaluated because they did not reply to the questionaire sent out to the event organizers, Walter Vetterli, spokesperson of WWF, Switzerland told GenevaLunch.
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Paleo has unveiled its concert lineup for the 21-26 July 2009 festival in Nyon. This isn’t a year for mega-names but the concerts feature a good mix of musical styles and names, including Placebo, The Prodigy, Francis Cabrel, Franz Ferdinand, Moby, NTM, Tracy Chapman, Amy Macdonald and Bénabar.
“My philosophy is simple: I like the world of music, and there I think global because you have to let yourself think big enough. But I drink “local,” Daniel Rossellat smiles, raising a glass of very good Chasselas from the vineyards near Paleo, the festival he founded more than 35 years ago. “I always taste the local wines. In 30 years I’ve been to pretty much every country that makes it.” He travels internationally year-round to listen to and find music groups.
Daniel Rossellat is still the boss at Paleo, which has grown from its first crowd of 1,800 to an annual sellout of 225,000 tickets for 120 concerts, and his stamp clearly marks it. But he says he is gradually making way for his successor. Or successors, for the team that is in charge has already shown their mettle, he believes, led by Jacques Monnier, who has co-responsibility for the festival’s programme. [Ed.note: see the 23 July Le Temps interview with Monnier on YouTube, about his favourite groups, at the end of this interview - in French]
Rossellat, who is known in local circles as a wine cognoscente, agreed to talk to GenevaLunch about his favourite bottles, at a hotel in Nyon where afterwards he would be glad-handing local business leaders in his role as would-be candidate for the town council in Nyon. While some people have expressed surprise at his shift from music festival man to politician, for Rossellat it’s a logical evolution. “We’re lucky to be a European model. We could be arrogant about our success but we believe we must continue to innovate. And we have to use our authority to encourage our employees and the public – and the region – to assume social responsibility.” Paleo won a Midem Green award in 2008, the latest in a string of awards for its environmental efforts.
Nyon, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Paleo Festival opened Tuesday night under nearly dry skies, witih a sea of tents on the ground. Local media are covering the festival (in French): Le Temps, RSR with audio podcasts, 24 Heures. GenevaLunch will be bringing you its own blog posts, from two young concert-goers.
