As travel has come to a screeching halt – I thought I would reminisce about the time I went to the MTV Europe music awards 20 year ago while I was living in Sweden. Enjoy!

I was living in Stockholm, Sweden in the beginning of 2000 and had heard that the MTV Europe music award tickets were going on sale that day. I locked myself in my office and just started dialing, getting a busy signal, hanging up, and repeating the process. I did this for about 30 minutes, about to give up when finally someone picked up on the other line.

“Yes, 2 tickets to the MTV Europe music awards please.”

The event was Thursday, November 16, 2000. We took the subway to the Globen stop. There were tons of people outside. They opened the doors and we walked in and were in the standing room only area right by the main stage.

The host was Wycelef Jean from the Fugees.

There were appearances by Ali G, Jason Priestley and Kylie Minoue, Savage Garden, Guy Ritchie and many others. There were also so many A class performances all in one spot: U2, Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, and the Spice Girls(!!).

Madonna performed “Music”

U2 performed “Beautiful Day”

The best song award was presented by Kylie Minogue and Jason Priestley.

The Backstreet Boys performed “Shape of my heart”.

The Spice Girls performed “Holler”.

Jennifer Lopez performed ‘Love Don’t Cost a Thing”

The BomFunk MCs performed the hit that was all over Scandinavia at the time “Freestyler”

Moby performed “Procelain”

Ricky Martin performed “She Bangs”

There were also performances by All Saints, Robbie Williams and Kylie Minogue, Ronan Keating, and Guano Apes. Youtube seems to have forgotten their performances.

Getting home

After the show was over, we took the subway back to our apartment in Södermalm. We got up to our apartment and realized we had forgotten our keys at the office in Gärdet. We ran back down to the subway and took the train to the office but sadly, the office was locked for the night. So now we had no way to get to our apartment nor were there any hotels in all of Stockholm to stay at as everyone had flown in for the Music Awards.

We went to the Scandic Gärdet Ariadne hotel and asked them if they had any beds available. They said they were fully booked. We told them of our predicament, that we had been locked out of our apartment. One lady decided to help us out. She brought us down to the sauna area and said we could stay here. She arranged for two roll away beds.

My wife and I slept in the roll away beds inside the sauna area capping off a very memorable night at the MTV Europe Music Awards.