Barcelona, come on, protect the motherland

Published on Mon 7 Jun 2010

I'm well early for my plane to New York, due to my general paranoia about missing planes and my inability to sleep in this morning. I'm sitting at the gate, 90 minutes before I need to be here eating my first McDonald's of not only this trip but the whole week in Barcelona, even though they (brilliantly) have one in the natural history museum I was at the other day. Pretty good achievement. The chips taste a bit weird though - I wonder if they still use animal fat here or something. And they've just announced that my flight has just been delayed by 90 minutes. Marvellous.

Everyone was feeling pretty ropey on the second day of Primavera and we didn't manage to leave the apartment until about 4pm. We went for a nice meal at a restaurant in the square round the corner, the highlight of which was a delicious gazpacho soup that I failed to convince anyone to send back for being cold. They also gave us the smallest glasses of beer I've ever seen (bear in mind that Mike has unnaturally small hands...)

Another odd thing about Primavera is that some of the shows are in a spectacular auditorium which you have to queue up or buy priority tickets for. Low were playing their entire "The Great Destroyer" album in there, which would've been well worth seeing but the queue was already miles long by the time we got there and tickets had long since sold out. I should've shown more commitment. Instead we watched The New Pornographers on the main stage, who were punchy and upbeat and sounded great...

...but, as bands often do when you don't know any of the songs, eventually got a bit samey and we went off to watch Scout Niblett. I saw her once before, supporting Will Oldham, and wasn't convinced, but this time I was, despite it being a teensy bit creepy. I'm not sure if all her songs are about death/murder but it felt like that and she has a tendency to start screaming with no warning.

Her drummer is great too - following what she does rather than the other way around and adding even more drama. He also helped my moustache count.

I'd heard good things about Ganglians so was all prepared to be impressed but they were so bad that I didn't even take a picture. Comfortably the worst "professional" drummer I've seen in a long time. For shame.

We watched a bit of Spoon on the main stage who seemed ok but I don't remember a lot about them, then a bit of Here We Go Magic who sounded promising, but that's when news of Gary Coleman's death came through so there was a bit of Diff'rent Strokes reminiscing. Did I ever tell the story about finding out Richard Whiteley had died while I was watching Conor Oberst call John Peel a "supercilious cokehead" while headlining the John Peel stage at Glastonbury? Anyway they're playing in New York while I'm there - might check them out again.

Wilco were next up on the main stage. I'd been debating whether to go to End of the Road this year because the line up looks a bit weak compared to last time and I'd have already seen Wilco twice in the last year, but they were so great (despite the amps all turning on and off at random for the first couple of songs) that they've convinced me that missing them would be stupid. We got a couple of songs from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (I forget which), and "Misunderstood" from Being There which are the only two albums I really know, but I'm going to have to get whichever has "Via Chicago" on it - it's been in my head all week for some reason. Their showy lead guitar player managed to keep the noodling down to a minimum as well this time - the other guy they have has a much nicer sound than him anyway, I don't really get it.

Marc Almond was, unintentionally, the most entertaining thing I saw. I'd been warned in advance that he isn't really capable of singing in tune but that didn't seem to be a problem. The problem, for him at least, was that he has made a new album which is (based on this showing) full of so-bad-they're-good songs that he seems to consider to be his finest work. We spent pretty much the whole set blinking at each other and going "did he really just say what I thought he said?". His flamboyant flouncing was in stark contrast with his band of ageing Teddy Boys' air of boredom and knowing looks. You could almost hear them tutting. It was a little bit sad, but quite compelling. I am seriously considering buying the album though - with lyrics such as "I am expanding like an excited flower" and "I'm an erotic neurotic, I need antibiotics" I don't see how it can fail. To be fair it was good to see "Tainted Love" and his closing song "Say Hello Wave Goodbye" was genuinely brilliant.

I'm glad that I stayed with him rather than leaving to jostle for position for The Pixies who were headlining the impractically busy main stage. They were, whisper it, a bit boring. Once they'd done "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven" and "Debaser", which were pretty early on, I lost interest.

We stuck it out to the end, apart from anything else because we couldn't get out, but it did mean we couldn't get anywhere near Yeasayer who were playing on the other side of the site. That too was probably a blessing in disguise, as Chris fell violently asleep the second we sat down to decide what to do.

He'd fallen violently asleep on the toilet a couple of days earlier. It's a good thing I could hear him snoring as there was no lock on the bathroom door and it could've been a disaster.

I was on a bit of a mission on the last day, starting off with a Jaegermeister and then having 1.4 litres of beer before the first band had even finished. The first band in question were Dr Dog, who Chris and Dave have been obsessed with for the last year or so. They were really good to watch in the sun - nice harmonies, lots of energy, though I think their sweaty, sweaty bass player might have preferred slightly less sun. They didn't really look like a band, which is quite endearing. They keyboard guy in particular looked as if he didn't belong. I wonder if they hired him because he has a Nord. I suspect that's the only reason The Travis Waltons are putting up with me. They'd also put glow in the dark orange tape around their guitars - presumably they got drunk the night before and thought it'd be funny.

Actually, we heard a bit of Real Estate before Dr Dog - they sounded really quite good and are apparently playing at Way Out West, so I'll see them properly then.

There was a 4 way clash at 8.30 - The Bundles, Sian Alice Group (I know nothing about them, but their drummer is the brother of one of our clients so I thought I might show willing), Roddy Flame and The Slits. I plumped for The Bundles because I'm a little bit in love with Jeffrey Lewis and it turned out that Kimya Dawson couldn't make it. It was probably a mistake - they were taking the loveable ropeyness just a little bit too far and the sound wasn't that great, which was unusual as it was pretty exemplary for the festival as a whole. On the other hand, Jack Lewis was wearing an anorak, and Jeff was wearing arctic gear, and all of them had eyepatches on for the first song - presumably they got drunk the night before and thought it'd be funny.

Things start to get a little hazy now, but we moved on to Built to Spill who I'd not heard of but Chris is really into and I enjoyed a lot, as I did Sunny Day Real Estate, who apparently have a guy from The Foo Fighters on bass. The Pet Shop Boys were headlining and I'd been a bit dubious about watching them, but with a band like that you pretty much know all the songs, and if you're in a good mood you can't fail to like it. The show was fun too - at one point all the dancers were dressed as skyscrapers. We somehow met up with everyone we knew and there were about 20 of us all dancing like loons for the whole set. I'm pretty sure there was some inexpert doh-see-dohing. I have an interesting video of Mike demonstrating some of his "moves" which I may put up here if I figure out how to get it off my camera, and Mike doesn't pay me not to.

He and Chris decided to go home after that, but the rest of us gamely carried on. I vaguely remember taking this picture of Dave (I still can't tell if the guy drinking knows what's going on), but I think we gave up a bit easily on a rich vein of comedy gold (I could've put the flash on for a start),

before going to watch the end of Orbital, who text message records show had some choice words for Chris and Mike.

Nick and I then got to the front of a DJ set at one of the other stages and jumped around like idiots and played pat-a-cake with random women. Most unlike me all this dancing. At one point a load of sombreros appeared and we managed to nab one and annoy other revellers by taking up loads of room with it until about 7am

when it all finally finished and we got The Metro back.

I arrived at the apartment to find that Chris had violently fallen asleep halfway through taking his trousers off. That's a pretty small window of opportunity.

We managed to get out of the apartments in time to say goodbye to Hannah and Mariam in the Placa Reial the next day then had some Spanish Indian food (not bad! Gorgeous chickken tikka, and a bit less greasy than in England, but I'm not convinced about the conical poppadums) before going to the club that we failed to get into on the Wednesday to see Jeffrey Lewis and The Junkyard. First on was some Catalan band that according to Nick were the best Catalan band he'd ever seen, but I thought were pretty crap - the drummer second only to the guy from Ganglians and the "funny noises" guy overly keen on using his theremin. Once per set is about right for a theremin. If that.

Jeffrey Lewis and The Junkyard were really good, doing a fantastic version of "Roll Bus Roll" which got to me, a few "movies" (slide shows with commentaries) - I don't think I'd seen "The Story of The Fall" before, and some of the other more upbeat ones from 'Em Are I. As usual with him, despite it being lovely, there were lots of songs I'd have liked to have heard that didn't get played. That's got to be a positive sign for a band I suppose.

I left bright and early the next day to go back home for one night, and started reading "The Angel's Game" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which is noticeably better written than the trash I've been starting and having no desire to finish lately. I suppose that if a book is good enough to get translated it's bound to be high quality. It was made even more enjoyable by being set in Barcelona and referring to lots of places that I'd seen in the preceding few days. It felt like the most fun nearly a week that I've had in as long as I can remember.