This week I am detailing the second part of my visit to the fine city of Copenhagen in June 2023 for which we were treated to ‘cracking the flags’ sunshine throughout. On the Friday night we made a visit to the remarkable Copenhagen Tivoli Gardens which is situated directly opposite the central train station.
Tivoli dates back to 1843 when the founder Georg Cartensen received royal permission to open the gardens. One of the earliest visitors was Copenhagen resident Hans Christian Andersen, who garnered inspiration afterwards for his fairytale ‘The Nightingale’.
Tivoli Gardens. Image Credit copenhagentickets.com
The current pantomime theatre which was constructed in 1874 is Tivoli’s oldest building and there were musical performances that took place driven by local composer H.C. Lumbye which including 800 polkas, waltzes and gallops! The overall site is also the second oldest operating amusement park in the world behind Dyrehavsbakken, which is also situated in Denmark.
It has over 4 million visitors per year and is a huge area spaced over fifteen acres and contains four individual roller coasters. When I was younger, I was fascinated by the bright lights, noise and abundance of different rides at Blackpool Pleasure Beach and I had many trips there, once seeing the comedian Les Dawson and his daughter on the Corkscrew.
That allure has faded a little as I have got older, but I am still a bit of a sucker for funfairs, and Tivola has that in spades. There is respite from the rides with many green spaces and pathways that you can meander your way down.
On the musical front there is the Tivoli Concert Hall which has performances from some of the prime performers in classical music and the Tivoli youth guard also play there. During the summertime they have a live music programme named Fredagsrock (Friday Rock) so naturally we had to attend on that day! Previous acts to play include the Smashing Pumpkins, the Beach Boys, Pets Shop Boys, Kanye West and Raveonettes.
After we grabbed a cold beverage at one of the many kiosks, we settled down on the grass to watch an artist called Emma Sehested Hoeg, who is an actress and writer. She has more recently become a singer and provided some dream pop in the mould of fellow actress Scarlett Johansson. After the gig we pottered into the adjoining large food hall to grab some tea.
Mojo Blues Bar. Image Credit youtube.com
I had already undertaken some prior research and sourced another interesting venue, so we exited from the back of the park and weaved down some back streets to reach Copenhagen Mojo Blues Bar. The venue was created in its current name in 1993 and has a very busy schedule with music taking place seven nights a week. It is primarily a late night blues site but does encroach into other genres as it stages soul, zydeco and bluegrass evenings and also has Thursday night jam sessions.
We arrived about 10pm but the place was only just booting up, so we had a choice of seats and then the 130-capacity room got busier as the night progressed. It was a fantastic old fashioned place and had the traditional grizzled but highly proficient artists playing. The band we saw was Copenhagen Slim and the EK Pones.
Slim has been playing on the circuit for a couple of decades and has surrounded himself with a fine band and they were on to their second set of blues rock tracks around midnight when we decided to call it a day and shuffled back out into the warm night.
Our final port of call on Day 3 was a sojourn to the remarkable Freetown Christiania which was formed in 1971 when a posse of young squatters and artists took over an 84 acre old military base. They created what has been described as an ‘anarchic enclave’ or as I viewed it a ‘permanent Glastonbury’. As you enter you pass under a sign saying, ‘You Are Now Leaving the European Union’ and they have their own flag and individual currency. They have around 900 permanent residents, some of them now third generation.
Christiania. Image Credit WorldAtlas
There was a 1976 protest track penned by Tom Lunden of flower power combo Bifrost which translates in English as ‘You cannot kill us’ which became the site’s unofficial anthem. In 1989 the Danish parliament legalised Christiania, however It has not been plain sailing with several drug and gang deaths over the years. Its main thoroughfare Pusher Street had an open illegal trade of cannabis until it was closed down in 2024.
Within the complex are three music venues, Den Gra Hal (Grey Hall), Christiania Jazz Club and Loppen which are all located near to the city entrance to the site. It is a humongous area, and we walked the majority of the ‘streets’, before gravitating back to the main areas where there are bars and food vendors.
On the day of our visit the Copenhagen Christiania Jazz Festival was in full flow, and we witnessed a band called Good for Nothing playing on a suitably makeshift stage. That evening we had some drinks and grabbed some tea at a floating boat restaurant in the nearby Nyhavn area of town.
