The legendary ‘Britpop’ band offers an electrifying concert of reduced dimensions in the La Riviera room instead of the performance that it had to perform in the City of Rock of Arganda within the framework of the festival, which suspended its day on Thursday due to the rains
Perhaps the least formidable of the enemies he had thought he would have to face the Primavera Sound when it landed in Madrid was the weather. He was faced with the challenge of organizing a mammoth festival in hostile terrain, no less than 40 kilometers from the city, and he knew that he was being played against by other all-powerful figures in the music industry who, apparently at least, had viciously counterprogrammed: no less that this thursday night Beyonce in Barcelona and on Friday Guns’n’Roses in Madrid. But none of them was the one who dyed the expectations of this festival black. ‘created in Barcelona’. It was something as prosaic as the weather, some rain that has not even reached torrential, which forced the cancellation of the event that was to be held this Thursday in the City of Rock in Arganda, with glittering stars such as Halsey, Le Tigre, Sparks or New Order erased from the map, and leave the festival-going crowd composed and without music, at least as far as tonight is concerned. At the close of these lines, the days scheduled in Arganda for Friday and Saturday were still running, although there were many who still doubted that something could be celebrated in that mud theme park that the images published on networks showed.
In the midst of the shipwreck, the powerful organization of the festival was able to at least save a couple of pieces of furniture from the shipwreck on Thursday: the live stage Boiler Room X Cupra, the one with a 100% electronic theme, and the most stellar of the concerts of the day, that of blurwhich could be relocated, with a reduced audience, in the room the riviera. About 2,000 privileged they were going to be able to see a performance that, if the expectations of filling the festival in Arganda had been met, they would have witnessed until 40,000. they tried place three other artists in La Riviera and a few more in other venues, but the margin was narrow and in the end it was not possible: “the venues have their programming and Blur want to act alone& rdquor;, they commented from the organization.
Tickets for the Brits took a (literal) minute to sell out when they were made easy to purchase on Thursday afternoon. At the time of the concert, at the entrance to the neighboring room madrid river drama was in the air. About two hundred people were waiting for a miracle to happen and they would be let in. Luis, a desperate fan with a ticket for the entire festival, complained that he had logged on at 4:00 p.m., the time of the scheduled distribution, and was unable to get a ticket. They also did not let him use the one of a friend who did get it but he could not finally come. His case was that of dozens of people, to the point that the capacity of La Riviera was not even filled.
Thus, bareback, without opening acts or milongas, at around 9:30 p.m. the four members of the London band appeared on stage, the only ones capable of disputing Oasis the scepter of kings britpop when there was that spectacular explosion of independent groups that became the best currency of the ‘Cool Britannia’ de Blait was the mid-90s. His concert this Thursday, with ‘set list‘ slightly changed compared to what was offered in the Barcelona edition of Primavera Sound exactly one week ago, however, was going to cover a broader period than the one in which they dominated the global alternative scene.
They started with the discreet ‘St. Charles Square’, for that of sneaking, first of all, one of the advance songs from their new album, the first they have published in eight years. A somewhat limp preliminary, but one that allowed the nostalgia operation to start without warning that devastated the room for the next hour and a half, and that at times turned it into what the place now is part-time, a discotheque, and at times into what It must be a good pop concert: a karaoke with the audience delivered. The gust began with that ‘There’s No Other Way’ so Happy Mondays and so 1991, and they followed ‘Tracey Jacks’, ‘Beetlebum’, ‘Villa Rosie’ or ‘Coffee & TV’, that idly escapist and rhythmic allegory of a generation that was not yet anguished about getting ahead because precariousness had not yet imposed fear on the future in western youth.
On stage, those four university students who in the 90s represented the posh face of Britpop in front of to the norteño and working-class spirit of Oasis they now looked like a gathering of cool ad agency CEOs and cultural studies professors. at a barbecue, because everyone was in a T-shirt except Albarn, who started in a casual suit and ditched his jacket in the second song. A group of attractive, well-read and well-traveled mature men who wore expensive horn-rimmed glasses and youthful outfits to take off their years. Albarn sang with the usual cocky attitude, spitting water at the audience and making jokes that his teeth might fly off in some of the songs (“there is no fixer in the ‘backstage’ & rdquor ;, he joked with disdain). He seemed somewhat more dedicated than in Barcelona, perhaps because of the small space and intoxicated by the steam emanating from the public. While, graham coxon he asserted his character as a guitar intellectual while savagely attacking it, and alex jameswith his hair cut to the bowl, looked mostly low poses, with a Dave Rowntree which continues to stick to the battery. They still have a few rehearsal room sessions left to 100% grease the show.
But it didn’t matter. When the train of songs arrived from that prodigious album that was ‘Parklife’, the chaos went off among a more intergenerational audience than expected, because that is what myths have: they survive through time. From that disc they fell almost in succession ‘End of a Century’, ‘Parklife’ and ‘To the End’. They prepared the ground forSong 2′, that would arrive a few songs later and would leave more than one kneecap fatigued with so much jumping to the sound of the famous scream.
They went into the encore with one of their great choral hymns, ‘This Is A Low’and on the way back they turned the audience upside down with ‘Girls & Boys’, Albarn all faces. They continued with the gospel hymn which is ‘Tend’they cast the new and meritorious ‘The Narcissist’ and they finished off the job with ‘The Universal’. The orchestra was missing, but hearing it live again only went to show that Blur have mastered the mechanics of pop music like few others. The night, coming out, looked somewhat more like what would be expected from the sky of Madrid. The meteorological strangeness had been expressed by Albarn earlier. “Today in England it is 32 degrees and sunny. Whoever denies climate change is a whore moron& rdquor ;, he released. As if they had heard him, those retreating clouds seemed to augur better omens for a Primavera Sound that, through miscalculations or not, did not deserve this eventful debut in the capital