(not about anything major, just about The Grand Opening)
Short version
We’re changing the Grand Opening into The Grand Gift.
Or, more accurately: The Grand Opening Mini Gift.
Which means that there won’t be one communal event to officially open the festival, but if you’re one of the first 50 people at one of the four shows that start at seven on the Thursday of Left of the Dial, you will receive a small gift.
Way too long version (but really… way too long)
As is usually the case with us, the Grand Opening started out mostly as a reaction to other events. Specifically, the ones starting their festivities in the traditional Dutch way: with boring speeches and bland hors d’oeuvres.
We wanted to do it differently. And for some reason, we felt it was important to honour the song we named our festival after. So, over the years, we came up with all kinds of different ways to cover Left of the Dial (the song by The Replacements) and did random stuff like watching a ship sail into the harbour or playing music bingo.
And if we may say so ourselves, we’ve had some fun Grand Openings. Even some really great ones.
Last year was a little unfortunate, with Storm Benjamin hitting Rotterdam at the exact moment of the (outdoor) Grand Opening. But nevertheless, we had a lovely time with the people who did brave the rain.
This year, we initially thought, let’s learn from our previous mistakes Let’s just move the Grand Opening of 2026 indoors, have a bagpipe player perform the Left of the Dial song, serve a ridiculous number of blue-coloured cocktails and it’ll all be fine.
But then we started thinking.
Doing more or less the same thing every year is beginning to look an awful lot like a tradition. We don’t mind traditions per se, but we really hate doing something out of a feeling of obligation. That’s just not us.
But more importantly, Left of the Dial (the festival, not the song) has changed over the last couple of years. Not drastically, but one major difference is that we don’t have just one slot that is officially the first show of the festival anymore. Since we’ve grown a little bigger, we need to have four stages all starting at the same time to fit everything in.
This means that The Grand Opening would always be closer to one of those first shows, and that feels a bit unfair to the artists playing the other first shows further away.
Besides, for a substantial group of people, Left of the Dial 2026 starts on Wednesday. Why would we officially open a festival on Thursday when it actually started the day before?
Well, because we said so.
We promised you some form of official opening, so that’s what we’re going to give you, despite all the reasons we just told you why we don’t really want to do the Grand Opening anymore.
Only, it’s going to be in the form of a gift.
Of course, it’s not going to be anything big or fancy. It’ll be a teeny-tiny present, probably only appreciated by the most fanatical memorabilia collector. And of course, it will have something to do with Left of the Dial (both the song AND the festival).
In other words: just come to one of the first four shows on the Thursday if you like crappy gifts.
Big love,
Les petits cadeaux de Left of the Dial
