Rock en Seine Festival
The standout French summer rock festival!
For more than 20 years, Rock en Seine has been one of the biggest dates on the French music summer calendar and it’s one of the great unmissable European festivals.
With a daily capacity for 40,000 festival-goers, Rock en Seine brings together some of the best international pop and rock acts, with emblematic headliners and the best newcomers in an ideal setting: the beautiful Domaine de Saint-Cloud
Rock en Seine is also supports all types of artistic creativity, with a vast number of events, exhibitions, talks and even a festival for the younger generation: Mini Rock en Seine!
Rock en Seine,
by Matthieu Ducos, the director
What does Rock en Seine mean for you?
Firstly, it’s about the line-up, which has to be simultaneously eclectic yet coherent, with a large variety of musical styles. Rock en Seine is a festival that’s in tune with the times, as it has amply demonstrated many times in the past. But Rock en Seine is also a unifying festival. It might seem obvious, but with such a rich yet varied line-up, with artists like Aphex Twin rubbing shoulders with The Cure or Polo & Pan, it’s really important to us that the spectators feel unified. It’s been this way for nearly twenty years now.
Rock en Seine is also so much more than just music.
Yes. For one, it’s an incredible location. It’s 20 minutes from Paris and yet you feel like you’re in another world. The Domaine de Saint Cloud is somewhere that has a real personality of its own. Also, it’s not just a music festival, we host photo and poster exhibitions, there’s a mini festival for children, conferences, debates… above all Rock en Seine is a meeting place, somewhere to express yourself.
There are more and more festivals in the Paris area.
Yes, and that’s a good thing. They take place at other moments of the year and have a pretty different aesthetic to ours, the spectators go for techno, or metal… I think that it creates healthy competition and it makes you question yourself; it makes us challenge ourselves every year.
What’s your best memory of Rock en Seine?
There are so many! But I get rather emotional thinking about The Cure concert of 2019, and of the crowd, really packed, and you could see longstanding fans from their early days as well as young 17-year-old fans. It’s not the only great memory I have, far from it, but it’s one of the concerts that I think best represents the spirit of Rock en Seine.
Artists
Rock En Seine has a rich line-up of nearly sixty names every year. There’s really something for everyone.
Rock en Seine obviously means all kinds of rock. Hits for the masses, with Thirty Seconds To Mars, Foals, Iggy Pop, Green Day, Arctic Monkeys, Placebo, Foo Fighters and The White Stripes.
Rock en Seine is also heady and melodic pop with glorious choruses. It’s Band Of Horses, Franz Ferdinand, Miike Snow, Beck and The Shins.
Rock en Seine also means the fevered beats of Paul Kalkbrenner, Flume, The Prodigy, Aphex Twin, Flavien Berger…
Rock en Seine equals discovery with Club Avant Seine, a selection of the very best of the budding French music scene: Fauve, Frànçois and The Atlas Mountains, Concrete Knives, Housse de Racket, Jeanne Added, Thérapie Taxi and Feu! Chatterton have all participated.
Lastly, Rock en Seine means timeless and exceptional moments. Like when the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures, comprising Josh Homme, Dave Grohl and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, surprised everyone when they played under the name Les Petits Pois. Or when Arcade Fire finished in a blaze of glory, conquering the crowd, despite the rain. It’s the landmark concert that Rage Against the Machine gave in 2008 to celebrate reforming. Or the amazing electro event organised by the Bromance label, bringing together Brodinski, Gesaffelstein and Club Cheval.
Rock en Seine 2024 is very much here. Prepare to be surprised!