034/ notes from Primavera Sound: the auditorium
Primavera Sound festival has one stage that’s an actual concert auditorium, fully indoors. It’s adorable — every festival should have one.
Bleed and chatter are such arseholes at big outdoor music events, they can ruin your day. So this one unexpected room grabs me. It’s a unique, potent bit of festival magic. The other Primavera Sound stages are the usual variations of the standard festie stage model, with one notable absence: there are none of those ‘marquee tent’ type stages, as you get often for a second or third stage at major UK festivals. The second stage at Reading (which I still think of as the Melody Maker Stage, though it can’t have been called that for 20 years) or Woodsies at Glastonbury, for example. It’s sunnier I guess, down on the Med. All the stages at Primavera are outdoor spaces, except for the mad Boiler Room clubbing venue and this fabulous, oddball concert hall.
This auditorium (branded ‘Auditori Rockdelux’) is a large, fully indoor, theatre seated concert hall, beneath a huge — strangely angular — modernist building, on the edge of the festival site (which Google tells me is Barcelona’s Museum of Natural Sciences). It’s all one level, there’s no balcony (or at least, not one in use during Primavera) and it feels roughly the dimensions of somewhere like the Royal Festival Hall. The seating does slope gradually down towards the stage, so views and sound are consistently excellent, wherever you’re sat. My vague guess is it holds about 3,000 people.
Into this space, PS programmes their most off-piste, experimental and quiet bookings. It’s where they put the folkies. There’s absolutely no bleed (even apart from being indoors, it’s a fair distance from the nearest rival stage) and it’s a very atmospheric room. During sets it’s very dark out in the auditorium, so people tend to treat it like a real concert, rather than standard festival munch. Also, I bet for some folks it’s just a great respite space.
Back in 2019, our first time, we saw Julien Baker’s fragile, virtuoso solo show, heavy on guitar effects and self-doubt. Also, the jawdropping Soviet-era Bulgarian state choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgeres with Lisa Gerrard as a guest voice and a backing band playing trad instruments that incongruously included a beatboxer. There’ve been similar unforgettable shows ever since.
This year we saw the great beat-affiliated minimalist composer (also lauded visual artist, player of prepared pianos, stuffed toy enthusiast) Charlemagne Palestine, who hammered away at syncopated chords over a shruti drone for most of an hour. Honestly, the sheer physical stamina was astonishing. The dude’s in his seventies, I’d struggle to play how he did for more than a few minutes. His piano was draped in multicoloured cloth and toys, until it looked like a homeless shelter.
We caught the heart-melting New York antifolk songwriter Joanna Sternberg, who is non-binary, and also has autism and complex needs, which must make touring quite a challenge. Joanna sings pop songs that hint of mid twentieth century vintage Brill Building songcraft (I’m not exaggerating that their best moments are only a breath off, say, Carole King) lyrically undercut by visceral self-excavation. That combination of killer material and dealing with mental illness onstage brings inevitable Daniel Johnston comparisons — but I think Sternberg is the greater artist by some measure.
We also caught a translucent piano and voice set by Lambchop, with songs joined into one whole by continuous neoclassical (improvised?) piano work between them, which also showcased the room’s ability to hold tension. This set was gorgeously lit, with three stark white spotlights from overhead. One for singer, one for pianist, and then Kurt Wagner’s drinks table, placed at a distance, had its own spotlight. Being lit from above meant you could never quite make out Wagner’s face, and when he wasn’t singing, he strolled between the pools of white light, becoming a ghost-like figure.
Often, when quieter acts play other stages, I wish they were in the auditorium. In 2022, Arooj Aftab and her fusion group (with Maeve Gilchrist on harp) ought to have been indoors, instead of out on the Plenitude Stage by the seafront. I know this because I saw them a month later at St George’s in Brighton and the benefit of an indoor room was enormous.
Now here’s the thing. I’ve not been in Auditori Rockdelux when it’s rammed. Perhaps they’re careful not to programme stuff that will fill it, or they’re not bothered and it’s a coincidence that I’ve yet to experience a gig with overspill. I imagine it could be quite scary if it was over-stuffed.
Because another key aspect of this space that I adore is how radically unstaffed it is, once you’re inside. The experience is treated as casually as rocking up to a festival stage. That’s not quite true, in terms of getting into the building in the first place — there’s a strict ‘no food’ rule, so security staff outside funnel entry and confiscate food items, which they put aside and people collect their bits as they come back out — but, once you’re in, there’s pretty much nothing to denote organisation. No announcements, no time calls, no stewarding. Gorgeously, these shows just kind of happen. The lights dim and the artist starts. I’d even describe it as something of an ‘empty’ kind of a gigging experience, because of what we’re used to with theatre shows. There’s no foyer stalls, no merch, no bar, no advertising or screens.
Basically, there are some loos, and a room with music in. And that’s it.
Quite heavenly utilitarianism, to throw focus onto music alone.
For me, the result feels like the purest imaginable concert experience, shorn of bullshit. Like, say, what a concert might be like in an anarchist utopia. Zero encounters with organisational authority, then a beautiful gig just, like, occurs, organically, which you can enter or leave at any time, because it’s all just part of the wider festival. Perfection.
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I recently reissued my fourth Chris T-T album London Is Sinking to streaming services. It’s almost 21 years old, came out in 2003.
If you’ve never listened to it, or not since the early 2000s, please give it a go, it should be wherever you stream music. Here it is on the dreaded Spotify.