- "Baby baby / Ain't it true / I'm in heaven when i'm with you"
PJ Harvey may well have been singing this about beautiful Barcelona. Every time i hear her voice my mind sweeps back to Saturday night where she put in a sterling performance wedged between Elbow and Primal Scream.
But let's flip it and reverse it.
Thursday 27th MAY
Pretty Girls Make Graves were our first taste of the festival and completely underwhelming. They reminded me of that quote from Clueless about "complaint rock", but without the tunes that made alternative music so cutting-edge in the early 90s. Nice ideas but poor execution.
FIX SHARP, LOOK SHARP! Dizzee Rascal rolled out red-eyed and ready to blitz Barcelona, launching into "I Luv U", backed by just one turntablist and a lot of expensive sportswear. The grime beats moved the feets with dirty treats... and every time he namechecked himself the crowd lost their shit. Although not quite loud enough, Dizzee's real talents emerged when the decks jumped and he freestyled about council estates and rising above a life of drug-dealing. His acapella rhymes were delivered with staccato precision. Cracking.
Blackstrobe chose to regurgitate trance synths from yesteryear and ended up putting me to sleep (literally). It may have been the extra-potent hash too. Snoring.
But this facilitated the most divine (musical) wake-up call in history. My fatigued body rustled to life at the sound of Daft Punk mixed into Lil Louis' 'French Kiss' - 2 Many DJs were exploding. Expectations can be an evil thing, but they vaulted above the pre-hype and had me trainspotting my lobes off. Porn Kings "Up to no Good" meshed with the chorus of Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers", which flowed into a lumbering remix of The White Stripes "Hardest Button To Button". How do they follow that? By rocking the casbah into "She Sells Sanctuary" (The Cult), then "Drop The Pressure" (Mylo) Blur's "Girls and Boys", Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" and the dirtiest acid-electro tune you will ever hear. I heard it the night before at a club called "Fucked" so i MUST track down the title. I think my scrambled notes saying 'Professional Distortion' may be a clue. Quote me on that. News just to hand has confirmed the track title as 'Rocker' by Alter Ego.
2 Many DJs were numero uno with ease - da Belgians got the skillz.
After such a party set, Miss Kittin had the difficult task of grabbing the crowd by the scruff of their necks and putting dips in their hips. She chose to churn out electro house with twisted tekky edges. Plenty of charisma behind the decks and a pair of white CFM boots that shuffled about seductively. Her mix of Underworld's Born Slippy was top-notch and although she didn't provoke the screams of 2 Many DJs, her set had a distinct personality that left us sated.
Amid the waft of passive-hash smoke and with a few Cerveza's for the road, we sipped and smiled all the way back to the Kabul Hostel.
Friday 28th MAY
Prepare to throw things at me... because i missed Franz Ferdinand. We DID allow 15 mins of lining-up time before the 9pm Glasgow start, but DID NOT count on the line being a kilometre long. I'm serious - a whole kilometre. Still, we made friends with our queue-neighbours and they just happened to be a bunch of entertaining Canadians which included MANITOBA. Gasp. We passed around the bottle of Negria Rum and chased it with San Miguel beers while singing "Les Poisson" from The Little Mermaid. Strange but true.
{Note: Every Spanish person i asked gushed that Franz Ferdinand put in a blinder.}
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone consisted of one guy who was, quite obviously, painfully alone. Imagine if you caught E from the Eels caught tinkering with Bruce Springsteen's keyboards. And add a few more octaves of melancholy. Soothing and succint.
The Russian Futursists were up next, more Canadian irony poured on thick. Naive charm makes bands great, and the five-piece emoted beautifully over sparse Korg and Roland melodies. Wispy, sincere vocals sat low in the mix, quirked along by a wry sense of humour. Our Canadian compandres started showering the stage in lit cigarettes, which each memebr of the band proceeded to smoke. Never seen that before.
Before The Pixies it was time for some clubbing, and we sprinted over to the CD Drome to find out what B.Fleischmann was all about. The answer: dancefloor dub. Driving basslines led us to another magical land, while a gold-toothed rasta helped with the chants and Bez-like vibes. His presence provided the archetypal smiling Ja-May-Kan face to lift the music beyond its roots - manuva!
CERVEZA!!!! Or 'Debaser' for the unitiated...
The Pixies were so note-perfect, so historically correct and so sincere that i felt as if i was witnessing a musical eduction, without the tonic triads my Year 9 teacher used to freak me out with. Guitars soared and sauntered, Frank Black emoted "then GOD IS SEVEN!!!!" like he had just been given divine knowledge and they chose all the right songs to keep die-hard fans satisfied. A crisp set of magical Pixies memories for future nostalgia. Aaah.
Saturday 29th MAY
Elbow played with accomplished swagger that induced neck-shivers for nearly the entirety of the set. Starting with the yearning of 'Any Day Now', Elbow were well-rehearsed and in gaspingly-good form. Chord after chord rained down with delicate force, Guy Garvey's voice lilted and flowed like a hungover Thom Yorke. Slow builds which Pink Floyd wish they could still write. 'Switching Off' cleansed the ears with gentle strumming. Exceptional
PJ Harvey moved her wiry body (clad in a slinky yellow dress that showed off her headlights) around the stage like she was being properly seen to. Glowing with post-coital confidence, she ripped through song after song of coronary classics, mainly focusing on tunes from 'Uh Huh Her'. 'Good Fortune' allowed her banshee-wail out of its flimsy cage and from there tunes like 'Big Black Monster' and newie 'What The Fuck' took a brave shape in the live domain. She shimmied and thrusted all over the stage, feeling every word she sang. Hell, she even had to force back tears when in the middle of 'Down By The Water' the crowd made the 'DINK DINK' piano sound. She just stopped for a few seconds, overwhelmed, and laughed in awe. Kamikaze was undeniably strong, charged with her charismatic sexual energy that i feel the need to keep mentioning. PJ stole the show.
Then Primal Scream returned it to the police with great vengeance and furious anger. Bobby Gillespie and co were on form tonight, nodding at each other in harmony as they gripped and swung Swastika Eyes and Xtrmntr at us. So what did we do? We mosh-danced!. I havent moshed for eons and it was quite liberating to be pogoing into senors and senoritas while Primal Scream razored their guitars and used their kickdrums with extreme prejudice. Gillespie too, like PJ, had a moment where he stopped singing and looked genuinely surprised by how much these Spanish cats were lapping up the Bobby milk. Life-affirming stuff for both performers and voyeurs.
Ascii.Disko was actually wedged in between those last two, playing dark industrial-tinged electro while his eyes rolled around his head. His choice of fist-punching tunes helped get us in the mood for Primal Scream, with pronounced elements of rock seeping then saturating. Seeping = sampling QOTSA's 'Feel Good Hit Of The Year'. Saturating = Hooking up a microphone and belting out a brilliant version of Iggy Pop's "I Wanna Be Your Dog". He even let one member of the crowd scream out the chorus into the mike. Yep, dat vos me. Ascii.Disko was also hilarious. He abused the crowd for "not farking dancing enough", then gave everyone a thankyou and a big LSD grin after his set finished. One to watch.
The rest of the morn post-Primal Scream involved dancing our asses off to Ferenc, Christian Vogel and James Murphy, who housed together The Stooges and Joy Division.
And thus ended my time at Primavera Sound. Enough to make this rascal dizzee. 11 outta 10.