Names, Dates, Numbers: Sziget 2016 is Starting to Happen

The other day, as I was idling home on Andrássy avenue, I saw the Christmas lights being turned on, and suddenly I went all gooey and mushy inside: ’Awww, there, it looks just like Sziget.’ While this might seem a bad case of getting your priorities wrong, I daresay it isn’t. Sziget’s night lights are just as pretty come day, while the ones on Andrássy look like pathetic little plastic snakes that crawled onto the avenue’s unsuspecting trees.

Sziget never gets bogged down by the mundane hassles of everyday life and that’s why in the cold heart of winter, when the warmest bit of your flat probably has the temperature of the coolest and windiest corner of the summer island, you wish you were back.

You also meet people in coffee shops and bars who wish they were back, and exile together becomes a bit sweeter, you reminisce together over photos, mark your calendar as totally engaged from August 10 to 17 next year, and make plans. Plus fret over who’s going to be on the line up, of course. You have your little list, check band tour schedules and keep your fingers crossed.

And then here comes the morning when you wear a Cheshire cat perched on a tree grin on your face, or well, there’s kind of no trees in Iceland, so you might as well be perched on the rim of some improbably named volcano: Sigur Rós are coming to our little island, and it’s going to be superb. (Insert random thought here: with a count of 441.000, Sziget has more szitizens than Iceland, we might as well send our own football team to the next European Championships then.)

We can further rejoice over news of MØ (I can use my favourite letter again in a hopefully majestic concert review, yes I can ) becoming a Sziget repeat offender, joining Parov Stelar and M83 in the club. Naughty Boy, Kodaline and John Newman move us in no particular way, but they must have their fans as well- Bring Me the Horizon definitely do, and they do move us in very particular ways, which on Sziget will manifest themselves 'as as far away from wherever BMTH are as we can'. But even that makes us happy, since spilling vitriol over a concert or two is a compulsory experience that not proper festival can do without.