In the days when they created their landmarks, they moved through theaters and medium rooms, and a decade later, this Saturday, they instead had a Palau Sant Jordi with 15,000 supporters at his feet. Time, that transforming factor, has played in favor of Antonia Fontthe group that elevated pop in Catalan to the highest cosmic spheres, breaking in its wake language barriers and prejudice.
His metaphors with views of celestial vaults and robotic devices ruled on a stage touched by satellite dishes, a nice retro-futuristic wink for a quintet that did not need more additives to connect (and it did, despite the fact that the sound was not the most optimal of its life). On his day, Antonia Font not only left its mark on a generation of audiences, but also on bands, like Da Souzawho opened the night touring his brand new ‘Dies d’attrezzo’, a pop song to the unpredictability of modern life ready for an imaginative Balearic tropicalism.
By interposed voice
And with Antònia Font, honors for that singer, Pau Debon, who has spent all these years reserving his voice for the group, with his black T-shirt, his jeans and his way of moving us without showing the care. That naturalness perhaps seasoned in so many town festivals: “quintupid! & Rdquor ;, he exclaimed at the sight of the crowd. To his right, the undaunted Joan Miquel Oliverauthor of the classics and new pieces, such as the title of his reunion album, ‘Un minut stroboscòpica’, bow of the session. Fresh material (seven quotes) which included some of those compromising love songs, like ‘Amants perfectes’, which Oliver, self-confessedly shy, agrees to compose because he knows he won’t be the one to sing them.
For a good part of the audience it must have been the first opportunity to taste songs live such as ‘Armando Rampas’, a space odyssey, or ‘Vos estim a tots equal’, an adorable animal hymn; slim and beautiful as in the old days. In this repertoire of 37 pieces (16 more than in the festival premiere at Primavera Sound) it was possible to appreciate the wide spectrum of the groupcapable of combining a waltz with reggae aspirations like ‘Vitamina sol’ with the metal-rap of ‘Astronauta rimador’ and the vocal solo of ‘Cartes a Ramiro’.
emotional ties
But Antònia Font’s personality was never based on a few genres, but rather on a way of handling them and fusing them with that vulnerable and naughty Majorcanity, with his ironies on account of tourist folklore (from ‘Holidays’ to ‘Islas Baleares’), his melancholy (introspective in ‘Dins d’aquest igloo’; expansive and choral in ‘Alegria’) and his fascination with heroes and pioneers ( ‘Miquel Riera’, ‘Bathyscaphe Katiuscas’). Songbook that, although Oliver acts distant, points towards the establishment of merciless emotional ties with the public: the thread that connected one of the best new songs, ‘Venc amb tu’, with the fetish rescue of ‘Viure sense tu’, that closed the night.
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Before that, all the desirable trophies awaiting their turn, such as ‘Clint Eastwood’, ‘Alpinistes-samurais’ and ‘Wa yeah!’, and the icy love story of ‘Calgary 88’, cascaded past, further straining the heartstrings. Antònia Font, breaking the fourth wall and the public, rushing the moment knowing that this return could be seen and not seen. “S’estan superant totes ses nostres expectatives & rdquor ;, slipped Pau Debon, and in his face you could read his wishes that this does not end here.