Kamp Student Radio

I am a big proponent of music festivals. Growing up in Austin, Texas, my parents told me stories of going to Austin City Limits (ACL) and seeing artists like Jack Johnson, Calexico, Wilco, and The Pixies for something like $75. In my ACL experiences, I paid somewhere around $360 to see artists that I loved and discover some that I had never heard before. It’s almost shameful to admit that I found Tanya Tucker’s music because my friends forced me to wait for Noah Kahan’s set. As a result, I’ve started paying attention to other music festivals, specifically the European ones. Reading and Leeds almost always has an incredible line-up. So does Primavera Sound, as I discovered through Eliza McLamb’s trek there. Given that I was studying abroad the next year, I decided to go. I planned a significant amount of my European adventures around the fact that I was going to go to Barcelona and go to Primavera Sound. It just seemed cool.

To set up some context for my Primavera Sound experience: Barcelona was my last stop on my three week trip around Europe after my study abroad course had ended. I spent a week in Scotland and Ireland and subsequently began the long-distance part of my relationship with an English boy I met in London. I spent a week in the Netherlands and Germany with my mother, and then I was on my own. I was exhausted and wanted to go home. I missed my friends, from university, and study abroad, and high school, and my family, and my pets, and my newfound boyfriend. I wanted to fly home straight from Berlin with my mother, but as I had spent a not-insignificant amount of money to go to this festival, I was determined to see it out.

My first mistake was that my hostel was about forty minutes, public transportation wise, from the festival. I had booked the hostel because it was fairly close to multiple metro stations and near the center of the city. Barcelona’s public transportation runs until 10pm on weekdays, midnight on Fridays, and 24 hours on Saturdays. Barcelona also runs mostly on a cab system, and doesn’t have Uber to the extent that we do in the States, due to government regulation. This matters because Primavera Sound starts at four in the afternoon and ends at six in the morning, taking place over the first week of June. The timing makes sense with Spanish culture, obviously, but I would not recommend it if you’ve been traveling for three weeks. It’s a miracle I didn’t get sick immediately after. The first day of the festival usually starts on Wednesday and is a free concert as long as you reserve the tickets in time. I did not, and missed out on seeing Wet Leg and Guitarricadelafuente. I wasn’t super bothered because I was hanging out with my roommate, who did the U of A’s summer study abroad Barcelona program, and had just arrived in the city. So our story starts on Thursday.

Friday, I went to the festival with my roommate and her sister, who was interning in Barcelona. My roommate and I met up, and, meeting resistance on trying to fit onto the tram that would take us to the festival, ended up taking the metro there. We started with Slowdive, on Revolut, who were near impossible to understand lyrically, but, similarly to Blood Orange, had a lush and expansive sound. As we went to the bathroom and got drinks, Ethel Cain played in the background. With the crowd still sparse, we ended up pretty close to the stage for Addison Rae, who gave a stunning performance that seemed more apt for an awards show than a music festival. I have seen artists try to put on pageantry-like spectacles at music festivals and it doesn’t always work. Costume changes for an hour set is very different from costume changes at a two and a half hour long show. This was not an issue for Addison Rae. Nor were her vocals, which I had seen people complain about online. She gave a fantastic performance and her dancer training will certainly lend to her cult pop star status. The crowd was also so lively, dancing along happily and knowing the words to almost every single song. She ended with “Fame is a Gun” and I slipped through the crowd to get to the stage next door, Estrella Damm, for the main reason I bought Primavera Sound tickets: The Cure.

The Cure is an extremely important band to me, mostly because I discovered them through my father. I think my father has extremely good taste in music. He doesn’t trend towards dad rock in the slightest and prefers new wave and post-punk acts of the 80s. He introduced me to New Order and Depeche Mode and Echo & the Bunnymen and INXS. The Cure is one of the only bands that he loves that he’s never been able to see live, so I felt incredibly privileged and verged on tears almost the entire set except for when they played “Lovesong” and then they flowed with ease. Most of the songs they played were from Disintegration (1989), The Head on the Door (1985), and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987). My favorite album from them is Wish (1991) and my favorite song is “A Letter to Elise,” which they did not play, but there was a true sense of community in the crowd. I will say (with only a little disappointment) that I was surrounded by mostly men, although of all ages and people who were speaking English, Spanish, and German. They closed with “Boys Don’t Cry” which might have been one of the best moments of my life. I got water and hurried over to fakemink, for ten minutes of UK underground rap that almost certainly sounds better in my headphones than through speakers. After he played a sped up version of “Easter Pink,” I swapped fakemink for another UK staple, PinkPantheress.

With the release of “Stateside + Zara Larsson,” PinkPantheress blew up again this past spring. Primavera Sound did not reflect her renewed popularity in the size of the stage they put her on, and as a result, I squeezed myself next to two girls in their mid-twenties, one of whom graduated from the University of Arizona, which I found out by eavesdropping. PinkPantheress performed almost all of her new album, Fancy That and a few of her COVID era hits. I greatly prefer the album version of “Stateside” so I was super excited that she performed the album version and didn’t bring out Zara Larsson, who had been seen in Ibiza a day before. DJ Joe was also there and her music reminded me of traipsing around London because she often soundtracked my adventures on public transport.

I had been separated from my roommate when I went to see The Cure and now had to try and find her again in the mess of everyone leaving. Our data was terrible and neither of us were receiving Whatsapp calls or messages from each other. After trying to meet up for thirty minutes, we walked her sister home and tried in vain to get an Uber for two hours. This ranks as one of the most frustrating and anxiety-inducing experiences in my life. I cried and laughed and told a girl I saw Olivia Rodrigo backstage at Geese at a bus stop. I got back to my hostel at 5am, my roommate got home at 5:30. To that I say, never again!