Hey ho, it's a few days late but here is installment II and III on the Primavera Sound festival.
Day two was better attended than the first day but still nowhere near as crazy as I was expecting, a few more stages were open and some more big names graced our presence. We arrived a little later and managed to catch another Australian, Mick Harvey, who wooed the Spanish audience with a bunch of originals as well as some covers of aussie classics (some of which I am embarrassed to say I didn't know!). After Mick we caught a bit of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs who we had seen a few weeks earlier at Coachella. While in Spain we managed to add to our repotoire "two falafel please" in Spanish which kind of dictated the snacks we ate the whole time. Later that night we also saw in no particular order Sleater-Kinney, Richard Hawley, Dinosaur Junior and the Flaming Lips. The latter went on at 2:15am and definitely stole the show with a stage performance complete with confetti, streamer guns, huge balloons and torch wielding santa claus' and aliens. We were both nearly falling asleep before they came on but their enthusiasm and stage props soon woke us up.
Day three rolled around and we were both buggered from the days before it so we planned to only stick around for a short while. First up was Shellac who played at an indoor auditorium where the crowd was seated (at first) in plush adult contemporary style chairs. We were both eagerly anticipating this show and they didn't disappoint, playing for an hour and a half with questions from the audience in between songs. They were great. After Shellac it was all the way over to the other side of the grounds to see Deerhoof. There wasn't so many people there as Lou Reed was playing at the same time so we managed to sit quite close to the stage for the first half of the performance, I thought they were really good but I think Marika wasn't too impressed with them. We were supposed to be seeing the Television Personalities as well this evening but they had pulled out at the last moment which was pretty disappointing. We went and caught the last bit of Lou Reeds set but I thought he absolutely tortured 'Heroin' and I wasn't prepared to stay around and have him ruin any more V.U. classics so we left...probably to eat more falafel. I had wanted to stay around to see Mogawai and the Boredoms but we were really tired and as they weren't playing till 2:30 and 3:00am it meant many hours of sitting and waiting and that wasn't terribly appealing to either of us old folk so we went home to bed.
Last day in Barcelona, I had been hanging out to go to the beach so we walked down to Barcelonetta where the local 'beach' is. It was actually pretty nice, clean water and all just one of those beaches with rocks and an obviously man-made feel to it. I did feel pretty out of place here, not only because I was the only chubby white boy on the beach (everyone else was gorgeous with full body tans) but because I actually went swimming. The beach had not a spare inch of sand to sit on but in all honesty there was about 7 people actually in the water. Oh well, they do have nice tans.
So now we are in Berlin, staying in a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy themed hostel (all the hostels in the area seem to have a theme of some kind) which is a dream come true for a nerd like me. We did a bike tour of the city today which was cool, tomorrow we will go and visit a few of the sites we saw today in a little more detail.
Off to Thailand on friday, will stay in Bangkok for three or four days to do some shopping (one pair of sneakers and two pairs of pants, I am in need of new clothes!). If anyone has any suggestions for a nice beachside retreat where we can go after that they would be greatly appreciated.
Smell you later.
