By Daniel Gordon BBC News

Bjork, The Who and The Arctic Monkeys were among the big acts - and yet it wasn't Glastonbury.

Mud was a dominant talking point at Roskilde

About 110,000 people turned out for Denmark's Roskilde festival, which ended in the early hours of Monday morning. In a country with a population of little more than five million, that's an impressive statistic.

Staged in fields about 45 km west of Copenhagen, it's one of the biggest events of its kind in Europe - the organisers of Glastonbury themselves acknowledge Roskilde as their closest rival for the title of best known music festival on the continent.

The rain threatened to ruin everything this year. More than a month's worth - 100mm - fell on Thursday, the first full day of the festival - a record for Roskilde's 37-year history.

Entire campsites were washed away, and watching Bjork's performance on the main, outdoor stage that evening was a miserable experience - truly ambient in the sense that the music was barely audible above the sound of the downpour.

There were complaints from festival-goers that more precautions should have been taken in advance - and that straw and woodchips to soak up the water and the mud were laid down far too late.

Roger Daltrey performed with The Who

But by Friday, the weather seemed more of an issue for the performers - who, ironically, were affected by it the least - than for the audience.

Big disappointment

A joke about the rain was de rigueur at the start of every act.

"In India, the rain is seen as God's blessing to the Earth," said The Who's frontman Pete Townshend. "In northern Europe, God seems to have a strange sense of humour."

Aside from The Who and Bjork, The Beastie Boys were among the other big draws.

Another hotly-anticipated show was the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Numerous other artists paid tribute during their own gigs, declaring it an honour to play at the same festival.

Maybe the hubris was inevitable, and no doubt the cold lead singer, Anthony Kiedis, was suffering from, didn't help.

Whatever the reason, the funk rockers from California were, by common consensus, a big disappointment.

Absurd

"They slowly lulled the audience to sleep," was the verdict of the reviewer in the official festival newspaper.

The Arctic Monkeys, on the other hand, did live up to expectations - even the sun came out for them, and the mud appeared all of a sudden to dry up.

But it was the American band The Flaming Lips which people listed time after time as their favourite act.

Flanked by a backing band dressed as superheroes, singer Wayne Coyne delivered a repertoire of quirky punk/pop songs he himself described as absurd, all the while strewing confetti over the crowd, and, at one point, crawling off-stage inside a giant plastic ball, in which he rolled over the heads of the audience.

The Flaming Lips somehow managed to turn a massive outdoor gig appear into an intimate performance.

The band are something of a friend of Roskilde. They come every year, and were here back in 2000, when the festival made headlines all over the world - for all the wrong reasons. That year, nine members of the audience died in a crush by the main stage.

Bjork has been played at a number of summer festivals

Since then, measures have been put in place to prevent a repeat. Access to the area in front of the stage is carefully controlled. Other festivals have learned lessons from what happened here in 2000.

Roskilde's international profile outside is still growing - though thankfully nowadays it's for other reasons.

The festival retains a loyal following among Danes - just as the Flaming Lips appear year after year, so too many of the audience come almost out of habit - regardless of who's playing.

Ticket scramble

They're the people festival spokesman Esben Danielsen describes as "the real fans - we couldn't scare them into not coming".

But more and more people are arriving from elsewhere in Europe - mostly from other parts of Scandinavia and Germany, but also, this year, 3,000 from the UK - the highest number ever.

Dave and Joe, both aged 23, were among the British contingent. They took several days to get here from Devon - even though Glastonbury was much closer.

So what was the attraction? "To get into Glastonbury, there was too much of a scramble for tickets," they explained. "Here, there's none of that, but you get to see the same bands, and you get a trip across Europe into the bargain".

One other advantage is that while Glastonbury is wont to skip a year or two, Roskilde is an annual event, so dates for next year - and for every year up to 2015 - have already been announced.