The city of Barcelona rounded off a magical month of May with the 9th edition of the Primavera Sound Festival, the musical culmination of almost 4 weeks of continuous street partying to celebrate the 3 football trophies won by FC Barcelona.
Over the course of the festival’s 3 nights over 76,000 people saw acts perform on 6 stages located at the main Forum site and a further 5,000 at the other 8 venues located around the city centre.
Located by the city’s beach, the Forum venue has been used for the last few years as the main festival site and provides a relaxed atmosphere for one of Europe’s most musically diverse festivals.
The city had waited some 22 years since the last time Neil Young played and the crowd were a mixture of veterans from his last appearance at the cities ‘Palau dels Esports’, to kids not even born when he played there in 1987.
At 21:30 ‘Shakey’ took to the stage and, as his contract decreed and in order to avoid any cross sound problems, was the only act performing on any of the festival’s 6 stages, ensuring the vast majority of Saturday’s 35,000 ticket holders saw him kick off the set with 2 classic tracks – ‘Mansion on the Hill’ from his 1990’s Ragged Glory LP and ‘Hey Hey, My My’, rightly reclaiming it from those who thought it was an Oasis song.
The sun was setting as Neil Young had walked on stage and the outdoor setting and balmy temperatures (and generous amounts of Estrella Damn cerveza!) added to the special feeling of the concert and brought the early evening part, which had seen The Jayhawks entertain the growing crowd at the main stage pre Young, as well as Hermand Dune on the secondary Rockdelux stage, to an end and prepared everyone for the ever excellent Sonic Youth who followed the Canadian.
It was Neil Young however, who was the main reason many people had travelled to Primavera and after the opening 2 numbers blasted his way through ‘Ready for the Country’, an epic ‘Cortez the Killer’ and a version of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ that had everyone singing in a kinda mixed up Spanglish. For me though, the highlight of the night was ‘Pocahontas’. It was the song that got me into Neil Young after hearing it on his Unplugged album, and tonights dirty, grungy take was a million miles removed from the acoustic version from 1995.
Young closed with a rocked out cover of The Beatles ‘A Day in the Life’ and ended a 100 minute set which underlined his continuing excellence as a live performer. The only complaint would be the length of the set, as it had been billed as a two and a half hour performance, but fell some 80 minutes short. However, what can not be argued is the quality of the set and those lucky enough to have a ticket for Aberdeen on the 24th June are in for a great night.