PP22: Nightwish and Floor Jansen’s sweet revenge

Nice, that Frozen cover, song festival smash hit ‘Euphoria’, and a duet with Henk Poort, but Floor Jansen doesn’t just come here for a big solo karaoke show. Not at all. If you want Floor Jansen, you get the package deal. And so she performs with Nightwish, the symphonic metal band from Finland of which she has been the eye-catcher for over a decade. With that band she plays the biggest stadiums for years, often playing in front of tens of thousands of hungry fans. But make no mistake, this Pinkpop show will be quite a big deal for Floor Jansen.

In her home country – ‘a postage stamp with 17 million inhabitants’ – Jansen flew under the radar for a long time. The singer herself noticed this quite incensed in 2018, when ‘the most unknown well-known singer in the Netherlands’ gave an interview to the Volkskrant. ‘When will you see me in The world goes on† And when will you hear Nightwish on 3FM? Never.’ And also: ‘I’ve been whining for years about a decent Dutch festival show.’

The fact that she is now at Pinkpop, the largest mainstream festival in the Netherlands, will feel like sweet revenge. And when you see the band playing like this, you immediately wonder: why was Nightwish never on Pinkpop before? Those explosive metal riffs, the pompous keyboard solos of band leader Tuomas Holopainen, the symphonic bombast with which Nightwish races over the main stage: it’s just kitschy enough for Pinkpop. The combination of pan flute with Irish bagpipes sounds like a one way ticket to Middelaarde, and in any case here on the Pinkpop field it is as if you are standing eye-to-eye with Sauron. Tering, what’s called. Jansen whips her hair like a sweat centrifuge as she stretches the full width of her register, and Pinkpop is roaring with pleasure.

THE MOMENT:
On ‘Shoemaker’, one of the songs from the last album, the band suddenly switches back a tad from MEGA BOMBASTIC to just bombastic. Jansen spreads her arms as if she could take off at any moment, her voice rising towards her flute register. Well done.

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