About superficiality

On a Wednesday it feels strange, but there we all were, attendees at the opening of Primavera Sound, filling the entrance walkway to the Fòrum. I don't know if it's because it was Wednesday or because of the new stage layout, or because we've all changed in a year, but yesterday you could breathe and watch the concert at the same time, and the service (both at the bar and mobile) was friendly and impeccable. You didn't feel like you were at a festival full of artifice and glitter, like last year, but rather at an honest, human-sized gathering that simply wants to have a good time without feeling like you're in an Instagrammable sardine can. This is the inclusive, comfortable, and friendly Primavera we like, but it's a bit hard to objectify its qualities. Perhaps it's the organization of the space, perhaps the civilized average age that came yesterday, perhaps both, but perhaps it's also that the Pet Shop Boys were performing yesterday. Impossible not to feel at home.

The last time I saw them, at that same festival, they had opted for a multicolored and childlike carnival. Yesterday the aesthetic was techno, Matrix, metallic, almost cold, but that even made all the warmth and tenderness come from the music. In an interview I heard how Neil Tennant was asked if what he did (along with Chris Lowe) was superficial music, and he answered a truth like a punch: "I can't think of a better way to reach depth than from the surface." And that's it: this apparent frivolity, in the case of the Pet Shop Boys, is impregnated in every idea and in every note with a tenderness that is impossible to take lightly. Yesterday there was a great audiovisual bet and a minimalist staging, masks and trench coats (sometimes you don't know if it's Tennant or Michael Caine singing), and a kind of lamppost where Tennant hung and over which it seemed it had to rain Britishly at any moment. As I would say Tennant doesn't know how to dance, he grabs onto lampposts and claps as if he were a mother happy to make children enjoy themselves. But before that, the welcome was dry, sober, with a tragic or rather melancholic Suburbia that contrasted with the hieratic position behind a very vertical mask. Then that's it, afterwards to clap. Without a mask. Tennant looked very happy, Lowe looked as inexpressive as ever behind the keyboards. A good summary of what was the origin of the techno we witnessed in the 80s: joy and seriousness, tenderness and coldness, superficiality and depth. All at once.

Then followed their infallible and numerous hits like Go west, It's a sin or Domino Dancing, with a special mention to the Elvis-esque You were always on my mind which is where everyone started to get up and lose their inhibitions. The encores (West End Girls and Being Boring) led to the dedication of the entire concert to Tina Turner, but they already had us in their pocket from about the third song. At first you suffer because you feel like a visitor from the past who arrived in 2023 from a very distant time, and therefore you suffer for yourself but also for them, wondering if the invention still works. It works perfectly, it works for all ages, it works for Barcelonans and tourists, and for expats, and for gays, and for straights, and for all conditions and options and races. It must be a real pleasure to go on stage knowing that you are the composer of such a pile of anthems, and that if so many people still recognize them (and live them) it means you nailed it.

A good start to the festival, which we will continue to visit during the week, but which has had the detail of offering a concert capable of summarizing the essence of Primavera and linking its origins with its future. It must cost a bit. We are getting older. But something always remains of us, also in some corner of the future, when we do things well.