Friday 28 May 2010

Primavera Sound Festival - Day 1

It is inadvisable to read a Courtney Love biography on the flight over to a music festival. Tales of this formidable woman's exploits got me psyched up for danger and I could feel my inner Jager beast rising to the surface. It´s been a long time since something lit a fire under my ass and I was hoping Barcelona would be the place. Unfortunately, last night, my visions of bloody crowd surfing and tequila snorting did not materialise. Day one of the Primavera festival proved relatively tame inspite of a promising start.

First gig of the evening was Monotonix who put on a glorious floor show. Crowd surfing, climbing on drums and general acrobatics. Their front man had all the energy of Iggy himself and it was the most exciting thing I saw all night. However, there was a definite trade off between music and showmanship which is a shame because from what I could hear their music sounded bloody good.



Next The Fall. Mark E. Smith strode on stage looking like Del Boy Trotter at gurning contest but as always he delivered the goods. Their new material sounded brilliant. To quote the massively over quoted John Peel quote, 'always different always the same'. The only problem with such a prolific band is that you never get to hear the songs you really want to hear but they gauged the crowd perfectly when they performed their cover of Strychnine. Garage rock and proto-punk is big here in Spain.



My first ever encounter with The Smith Westerns was on the Pitchfork stage. Rudimentary indie from long haired adolscents who had me wanting to shout 'more than words!' owing to their uncanny resemblance to nineties band Xtreme.

Last night also saw my first gig encounter with Broken Social Scene and although friends have assured me of their brillance I somehow managed to miss the boat. Even when Spiral from Pavement join them on stage I failed to feel any stirrings.

The night culminated with Pavement. The atmosphere in the crowd was electric and by the time they played Cut Your Hair the crowd was in a frenzy but by then I had heartburn and was a little too drunk so I had to retreat to the bean bag area halfway through and only caught my favourite Shady Lane on a big screen.


Oh festivals, why do I always peak to soon? I bet Courtney would have never retreated to a bean bag. Still, there's always tonight.......

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