Primavera Sound Festival 2016

Introduction

In its early years the name alone wasn't quite enough of a draw: "Primavera Sound" sounded like just another festival on the European circuit, and even though the location was one of the most tempting around – Barcelona and its perfect climate, in full bloom just before the warm embrace of summer – you still had to check the lineup carefully before making up your mind. Now, sixteen years on from its birth, Primavera Sound has become a brand in its own right: just say the name and it conjures up small, bright words like "fun", "sea", "summer" and "great music".

Radiohead above all, Brian Wilson with the masterpiece "Pet Sounds" fifty years after it was conceived, PJ Harvey, James Murphy and his mighty LCD Soundsystem, Kevin Parker and his vividly colourful Tame Impala, and Sigur Ros with their gigantic nightmares/dreams – these were the biggest names of this historic edition, all of them contributing to the unexpected sell-out of roughly 200,000 tickets a full four months before the festival officially began, confirming once again that Primavera Sound is now a must for every lover of "alternative" music in Europe – and, why not, in the entire world.

Alberto Guijarro Rey and Pablo Soler (the festival's two organisers) have managed to build a perfect machine, oiled to perfection by an organisation that is now practically flawless and manages to keep everyone happy: getting there an hour early to see your favourite band will be enough to land you a spot right at the foot of the stage, set times are always respected, and if you're hungry or thirsty you'll be sorted within minutes either way. What more could you ask for?

With more than ten stages scattered across the striking Párc del Forum, half an hour from the centre of the Catalan capital, extremely easy to get to – and this year, extremely easy to leave in the early hours of the morning too – and enjoyable at any age, Primavera Sound, with its total budget of twelve million euros, waters and makes beautiful Barcelona bloom without ever drowning it, turning the city, for the occasion, into the European capital of good music.

In taking stock of Primavera Sound, it's worth remembering that in fact the whole city is awash with music for about a week – not just during the three official days of the festival – spreading its nearly 250 bands not only across the vast Párc del Forum area but also through the venue where the festival was conceived almost twenty years ago: the ever-reliable Sala Apolo. Another hub for the pre- and post-festival shows this year was Sala Barts – another modestly sized venue/theatre in the city centre – where LCD Soundsystem played a surprise show announced just days before the festival, accessible to only around 600 lucky holders of the full festival pass, who literally sold out the tickets within about three minutes of them going live on the Primavera Sound website.

Day one

The first impression on entering the Párc del Forum is of being closer to the exotic, bizarre atmosphere of a Lollapalooza than a Sziget, and that's probably down to the fact that a certain kind of music – here still labelled "alternative", more as a synonym for "non-commercial" than anything else – draws a certain kind of crowd. The constant visual bombardment from the various brand partners – H&M, Heineken, Noisey and many others – means that fashion and a certain aesthetic sensibility (at times overflowing and almost cloying) end up giving the festival even more colour than the music and the beautiful setting alone manage to provide. What we saw – and what you'll no doubt see even more markedly in future editions – is a parade of flamboyant costumes and one-of-a-kind characters, at once ridiculous and charming, the kind that will often bring a smile to your face and a general sense of "party" rather than "music festival" – which, frankly, we don't mind at all (a feeling the Spanish call postureo).

Treated from the hottest early hours of the afternoon to the delicate, enveloping electronics of Dj Koze, we while away the time without much excitement until the seductive performance of Daughter and the surprise of El Ultimo Vecino, a band much loved on the Iberian peninsula.

Filled up on cheap vegan burgers and quenched with a few bitter, hop-heavy craft beers, we watch the sun sink behind the vaguely Eighties-looking buildings surrounding the outskirts of Barcelona and the Forum itself, a sign that the festival's first truly major performance is about to begin: that of Air. The French duo come away with a draw, no more, no less. Two ageing, slightly rusty gentlemen play for a little over an hour and a half, mixing old hits with new songs that aren't especially inspired; and yet, even with an apparently out-of-tune bass, hearing "La femme d'argent" at sunset by the sea isn't exactly something that happens every day.

Floating Points, meanwhile, waits hunched over – with the wire-rimmed glasses of the neuroscientist he actually is – on the other, smaller stage called Ray Ban, where he delivers a spectacular live performance, never too dark, never too lively, drawing you in right to the end with his whirlwind of never-obvious electronic playing.

Horror guru John Carpenter, meanwhile, caught more or less everyone off guard with his synth-driven, at times vaguely rock-leaning show on the Primavera Stage, creating something halfway between a live scoring of some of his classic films and an actual concert.

Tired of the dark tones offered by the last two acts, we decide to head back to the two main stages, where on one (the H&M Stage, to be precise) Tame Impala were warming up, and where on the other (the Heineken Stage) the ever-enduring Explosions in the Sky dish out bread and wine to anyone craving proper, raw auteur post-rock.

Tame Impala's performance is that of a band in a state of grace, technically flawless and undoubtedly gripping on an emotional level too. Unlike what happened with Air – who played the same stage shortly before – the sense here is of watching a group of friends having an absolute blast together, unafraid of anything. Telling, too, is the fact that a spectacular power cut – a kind of unexpected coitus interruptus – during "Eventually" was taken, flipped around and turned by Kevin Parker and his devoted crowd into a genuine running joke, one that kept resurfacing throughout the festival in the toilets, on the metro, and among clusters of bored people waiting for other bands to come on.

James Murphy takes the stage at ten past one in the morning at an embarrassingly, almost absurdly loud volume; with real flair he and his LCD Soundsystem move the immense crowd before him with nearly two hours of energising, revitalising funk. A compelling, gracious figure, and undoubtedly essential to the vaguely electronic groove of the 2000s.

A little later, over on the smaller stages, where the survivors' eyes get redder, legs more tired, feet more swollen and jaws more prone to wobbling, Neon Indian apes the late Prince with a cover and entertains with a vaguely interesting performance that, coming right after Mr. Murphy, admittedly leaves something to be desired and never fully satisfies.

Battles are as entertaining as ever, and during the legendary “Atlas” (played to perfection) the crowd goes wild to the industrial rhythm of what was once a landmark track in the days of the great Matias Aguayo. Hudson Mohawke closes out, with unexpected class and skill, an important and reasonably danceable day, one that ends to the strains of “Eventually” – sung by some former drunk – on the night tram (running all night long), lit by the dull, restorative light of the morning of Friday, June 3, 2016, in a Barcelona that is beautiful and running like clockwork.

Second day

Skipping over most of the concerts on the Primavera Sound afternoon bill, I can't help but admit that for me (and surely for most of those present) the one name echoing in everyone's head is that of the band from Oxford: Radiohead.

We arrive at around eight in the evening. Just past the famous sign at the entrance to the Forum, a friend remarks that many bold devotees had already been waiting for Thom Yorke and co. since at least 4 in the afternoon (rumour has it that roughly 50,000 people were in front of the Heineken Stage enjoying the historic and practically flawless Radiohead performance). Plenty of controversy has sprung up around the deliberately low volume the band chose to play at, and several sources have confirmed that it was indeed a decision made by the quintet itself, not one forced on them by festival staff.

The delightful, elegantly arranged setlist for the occasion opens with “Burn The Witch”, greeted by a roar from the crowd loud enough to give chills even to the few stragglers who, from a distance, chose to boycott the concert/event of the year. After a deliberately soporific opening half hour in which several tracks from the new “A Moon Shaped Pool” are played to perfection, the first real jolt comes with the violent, cutting “The National Anthem” and the gorgeous “Talk Show Host” that follows.

A practically silent Thom Yorke, interacting only through a couple of polite remarks, does his job and little more; the trouble is that, in this case, that job is on a level almost impossible for the other bands at the festival to reach. To anyone tempted to brand the show with words like “boring”, “sad”, “dead” or “soporific”, I'd like to point out that seeing Radiohead live these days has become something like attending an Ennio Morricone event: you listen, you enjoy in silence, and you scream only if you really can't help it. So, towards the end of the show – by which point we'd already escaped the mass of “sardines packed into a crushed tin” known as the “audience” – Thom and co. truly satisfied the hungriest mouths with tracks like “2+2=5”, “Paranoid Android” and the unexpected “Creep” – initially left off the official setlist – filling everyone with an annihilating kind of love.

That last track, in fact, is only recognisable to us and to everyone else waiting for Last Shadow Puppets, Alex Turner's band, on the stage facing this one just a few hundred metres away, from its very first few chords, yet the experience feels almost better this way: the sound of those four chords and Thom Yorke's generational lament arrives so faintly that everyone (and I mean everyone) seems to feel the need to first whisper it, then scream it with all the vocal power mother nature gave them, binding everyone present in one powerful sing-along embrace with no ethnicities, no tastes and no prejudices, giving us perhaps the single strongest emotion of the whole festival.

We hardly care that we missed the (probably sparse) and desolate sets put on by thoroughly respectable bands like Tortoise, Royal Headache, Shellac, Animal Collective and Dinosaur Jr, more than convinced that the place to be was right there, next to Radiohead.

A little later Alex Turner, right on time, takes the stage backed by a small but effective little orchestra made up of four string players, his faithful sidekick Miles Kane, and of course the full band, all set up in front of a backdrop reading “The Last Shadow Puppets”.

The Arctic Monkeys frontman leaps and slides across the entire stage for the whole show, as if he were some hybrid of Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger and Freddie Mercury; once you get past whatever irritation or dislike his early androgynous theatrics might provoke, you start to love it, since technically and vocally there's practically nothing to fault him for. The sound jolts the crowd out of the emotional, nostalgic haze Radiohead had gently led us into by the hand, and the big, powerful, glittering sound of the English duo does its job, riling up and unleashing the crowd in one huge musical orgy that reaches its peak in an almost theatrical staring match/showdown between the two frontmen, which by the end erupts into a jubilant roar from the audience. Worth a special mention is the gorgeous (and flawlessly performed) cover of the Beatles' “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, warmly received by the excited crowd. Alex and Miles leave, and the feeling is that we've just witnessed one of the phenomena of our time, still growing, with undeniable talent.

As if we were the ball in some enormous tennis match with bands like Radiohead and Last Shadow Puppets as the players fighting over us, the moment comes once again to turn around and head to the stage Thom Yorke had graced just a little earlier, to catch Beach House grappling with a crowd perhaps too large for their intimate chamber-pop melodies.

No hunch or premonition could have been more wrong: Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally's band reworks its repertoire brilliantly, and without ever sounding forced, stretches, dismantles, trims and blends many of its old and new songs, giving the whole set a far more shoegaze, guitar-driven edge than usual, ending up laying an enormous, fibrous, vibrant carpet of good feeling and heart-wrenching hope over the heads of the crowd, in a genuinely fine collective euphoria.

It's now the dead of night, and the shoes we're wearing have turned beige from the sandstorm that rises and falls with every movement. Little clusters of people are shaking off their hangovers (others are still deep in the throes of one), and plenty of people are half-dancing to whatever gives them the chance to dance, between one set and the next, in an atmosphere that, despite the hour, carries no trace of worry or drama. The night still feels young to anyone not yet ready for sleep.

Greeted by a wonderfully warm welcome, it's time to enjoy the final stretch of the set by Australia's Avalanches, the cult group who, back in 2000, released what many consider an outright masterpiece titled “Since I Left You”, said by legend to have been built from more than 3,500 samples lifted from all manner of vinyl records. The vibe is good, the crowd responds, the beat stays with you and it feels great; the night gets later still, and there's a need to move even more to keep exhaustion at bay; what's needed, in short, is Maceo Plex.

The American – who cut his teeth back in the day at the legendary Ibiza of Space and Amnesia – knows how to keep the crowd on its feet, and he pulls it off: with tracks that lean into a delicately house-inflected sound before veering toward a far more violent, techno-leaning finale, Maceo Plex sends us off to sleep in the first hours of dawn, serene and satisfied.

Energy is running low, colleagues swap memories, and the feeling that it's all basically already over starts to take hold. Sigur Ros's presence doesn't stir much excitement, since we more or less already know what to expect from them; the German trio Moderat gives us reason to hope – despite their disappointing, uninspired latest album, and despite no longer being a "discovery" – and PJ Harvey divides opinion, while it suddenly comes back to us why this edition of Primavera Sound can truly be called historic: Brian Wilson is here with his Beach Boys (or what's left of them), and if you stop to think about it, how many of your friends can say they've seen the Beach Boys live? Not many, I'm sure.

The Heineken stage, polished to a shine, gets ready to welcome the legendary Californian outfit, and a crowd that's more than just varied waits with a mile-wide grin for the arrival of its leader, who indeed (at 8 o'clock sharp) appears on stage amid a warm roar from the audience, escorted arm-in-arm toward the piano that will serve him as instrument and support for the whole show, given the seventy-three years that inevitably make themselves felt.

Brian Wilson's tragic personal history and the deep affection for his songs charge the performance with a considerable, vibrant nostalgic air, and every vocal flourish attempted (and often missed) by the living legend from Inglewood ends up stirring the same emotion as watching a puppy take its first wobbly steps. The volume is never quite loud enough, but the band on stage – featuring giants of the music like Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin – still delivers genuine emotion and a show that's practically flawless sonically. In truth (to be fully honest), the songs in which Brian refrains from singing turn out to be the best ones "musically speaking", while tracks like "Caroline, No" and "God Only Knows" wouldn't have been the same without their creator's own voice. The dirty work of falsetto singer Matt Jardine (Al's son) is carried out with excellence, and he's forgiven within minutes for the tough task of standing in for that high, piercing yet delicate voice, which age no longer allows its owner to reach after decades gone by; what results is often a back-and-forth between him and Brian, at times flawless and perfectly timed, at others a little less so.

At the end of the deeply moving hour devoted to "Pet Sounds", many know it's not over yet, and that for a man/artist of that age, locked away in the prison of anonymity for far too many years, the urge to play other classic songs from the band's catalogue is surely far stronger than simply doing the job and going home. Indeed, the first track to kick off what turns into a full-blown Hawaiian-style party – and a far more authentic one than any you're likely to see in your life – opens with the wonderful "Good Vibrations" and continues with "I Get Around", "Surfin' Usa", "Good Vibrations" and many others.

One wonderful aspect of the concert was seeing how Brian was actually the happiest and most excited person there, breaking between songs into little kid-like remarks such as "and that was the last song, but of the first part, now we're going to do another one that actually has really beautiful lyrics!" and so on, drawing from the crowd smiles and applause full of love and respect for a man who has really given us far more than you might think. Closing with an old-fashioned bow from the whole band on stage, the Beach Boys' performance ends with just one certainty: it was beautiful, and it will never happen again.

From that moment on it's all downhill, though there's always something to learn from PJ Harvey. The now almost fifty-year-old Englishwoman delights the crowd in the early night hours with inimitable rock, performing her hugely interesting latest album, "The Hope Six Demolition Project", almost in full, backed by a fantastic band dressed for the occasion in a fierce all-black, led by veteran Mick Harvey, formerly of the Bad Seeds – leaving everyone happy, stunned, dazed and disoriented, enchanting her devoted fans once again.

It falls to Moderat to deliver the last real performance in the main-stage area, and we could say they only half succeeded. For those who have already seen one of their shows, there was nothing new here, and the formula essentially stays the same: build-up, build-up, Sascha Ring's voice to keep everyone happy and sell a few more copies, and then in comes the almost punishingly heavy bass, cracking ribs like a tank driving straight into your chest.

The new songs leave a lot to be desired, while the old hits – like "A New Error" or "Rusty Nails" – keep obliterating everything, like a blinding four-on-the-floor tsunami arriving to wipe clean everything you've seen up to that point. By the end of the set people stumble away disheveled, dustier than before, visually stunned and happy to have gotten exactly what they expected from the Berlin trio.

It's now 4am, and shamefully (after three days of the festival) we discover a new stage shaped like a small island, a sort of festival-within-a-festival, something like a happy little electronic oasis – complete with a bar, a food area and a small beach – pulsing away and offering a more than interesting alternative to Primavera Sound's classic, long-established main stages.

Getting people dancing during the festival's final hours at the renamed "Beach Club" is John Talabot, who does his job well, giving the usual treatment to Catalans proud of their hometown hero, and offering tourists a decent and interesting alternative to the ever-present, always-trashy Dj Coco, who has closed out every edition of Primavera Sound by wiping from the survivors' ears every last bit of taste and originality they might have picked up over the course of the festival.

Dj Coco is trashy and allows himself every kind of liberty, which can prove to be both a good and a bad thing at once. While Neon Indian found the nerve to pay tribute to the late, lamented Prince with an interesting rendition of "Pop Life", the Spanish DJ managed to leave the surviving crowd – suddenly reborn and armed with the previous afternoon's sunglasses – in tears with a heartbreaking "Heroes" by the immortal David Bowie, closing out the sixteenth edition of this wonderful festival on exactly the right note, and with exactly the right feeling: nostalgia.

"Nostalgia" was the dominant word of this festival, which managed to offer interesting new acts alongside wonderful old certainties, and it was inevitably the latter that tipped the scales, becoming the true main artery running through the whole of Primavera Sound. Thom Yorke and Brian Wilson, PJ Harvey and James Murphy gave us one hell of a party, which, with David Bowie's music playing in the background, sent us drifting out of the wonderful Párc del Forum in the early morning hours of a Sunday quite unlike any other: June 5, 2016.

Having reached the tram while zigzagging through the ever-efficient festival staff, we find a young guy in sunglasses who, as the doors close, starts singing the chorus of "Eventually," immediately joined in chorus by everyone else present, suddenly possessed once again by a bright, buoyant morning energy that only a great night out can give you. Proof that music brings you to life, and that Primavera Sound makes you immortal.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google