036/ notes from Primavera Sound: a new rule for tribute acts
We’re at the main pre-party, the night before the festival starts. It’s a big free gig for the city.
We get food and wait for a band called Stella Maris.
I thought I vaguely knew them: maybe a late Britpop-era band called Stella Maris? Maybe with a sort of Stereolab-ish vibe? I assumed it was them, and that they were bigger in Europe than I’d realised, maybe it’s a comeback, maybe it’ll be interesting… I don’t know shit, basically. I must’ve invented that whole thing from scratch. What happened next was one of the more mind-bending gig experiences I’ve had.
This girl band bounds onstage. Stella Maris are a Spanish girl band. They do choreo’d cheapo 2000s chart pop, like a low budget K-Pop band, hints of vintage Steps (though all girls). However, you gradually realise the music is all overtly about God and Jesus, and also their family life. The visuals behind them tell this family story: a reluctant, slightly unsettling group of young sisters, formed by their parents, to preach the word of God. It’s compulsory for the young girls to be a part of it. Then, their mother sadly passes away. This was all about a decade before, and their father has got through his grief with his devout faith, and by managing his daughters’ band. To give you a sense of the production values, their messaging flashes across huge screens in multi-coloured Comic Sans on top of phone-cam photos.
Then the dad actually shows up onstage, doing something akin to preaching, mashed with old dude rockstar schtick.
And here’s the thing: they’re treated like huge stars. This vast homegrown Catalan crowd seems to know most of the material. They’re singing along, clearly familiar with the characters. Because it’s the free pre-night, this isn’t your typical Primavera crowd. Locals can get a ticket for €10 deposit, which is added back onto the app as drinks tokens.
So, what is this band? A piss take? Some of its elements seem full-on gonzo, yet at the same time, other aspects of the show come across utterly sincere and even a bit too serious.
Then, about three-quarters of the way through, from the back of the audience, a big throne is held aloft, physically carried, high above the crowd, making its way through the throng of people towards the stage — and in it is the prone corpse of their mother, who we’ve seen in photos, who’s supposed to have been dead for ten years. As it nears the stage, suddenly she’s shaking and quivering — and the mother of the girl band is magicked back to life to roared approval.
Okay so it’s clearly fiction but, I mean, obviously, we had absolutely no fucking clue what was going on.
The mum climbs onstage, says some words, lurches around for a bit, then goes off to the side as the next song kicks in. More psychedelic imagery, more family footage, more low rent religious iconography onscreen.
I won’t figure it out until much later tonight, back at the hotel, via Google. The answer (of course) is television: this is the ‘band’ from a fictional Spanish hit TV drama about an evangelical Christian family and their Gospel sharing girl band. But what a great, magical thing, not to have known and not to have understood a word of what was going on. The chaos of it unfolded in real time. Also, this was a once-only live event, so locals who did understand what was going on were getting a huge treat. The mum and dad are apparently major national telly stars.
We left the show boggled about what on earth had gone on. After finishing — all giving a mass bow, with a load of other people coming onstage to take bows as well, which added to our confusion — the headline act that night was Phoenix, which suddenly felt so normal by comparison, with everyone taking it in their stride and getting into Phoenix’s sophisticated French anthemic pop/rock.
It added to the sum of the weirdness.
Once we found out what it had all been, this gargantuan, potent sense of the zany, the unhinged, in front of (and intensely involving) a huge crowd, could be understood as delicious live spectacle: part music show, part gonzo comedy multi-media production with backstory, part participatory mass delusion. But without the cues of foreknowledge, it was a uniquely strange hour.
A week later, a few miles down the coast in Sitges, we’re accidentally in town for Sitges Pride, which has an open-air stage on the seafront, it turns out, only thirty metres or so from our hotel room. There’s room for an audience of perhaps a thousand or so. On Thursday night, the two billed co-headline acts are the Black Eyed Peas and Tina Turner, advertised with no further context, no clarification that it’s a tribute show. After a number of local warm-ups, drag queens and pop singers, Tina goes on first and does a solid job. But then we get an outfit singing and rapping a Black Eyed Peas covers set to a backing track, through to 1:45am.
Afterwards, I wished with all my heart that Tina Turner had opened her set in Sitges, the way Stella Maris’ mother had appeared.
Here’s my new rule: I reckon, if you do a tribute show to any famous music artist who is dead, it should be a legal requirement that you begin the show by re-animating that artist in dramatic fashion onstage, perhaps nodding to something in their act, or relating to the actual manner of their death.
It should be compulsory, or at least become an accepted cultural norm.
Like, every Nirvana tribute band should be obliged by law to start with a dead Kurt, who comes back to life in the opening number, like that Reading 92 performance when they pushed him onstage in a wheelchair. Every Zep tribute begins by re-animating the drummer.
Elvis impersonators by law begin their gigs in a fat suit, with their head down a toilet, arse-to-the-sky, in one hand holding a massive beef burger. Lightning strikes. Their body shakes… and suddenly, it’s upright, ready to rock’n’roll.
Maybe that show runs chronologically backwards. After the first three or four numbers, Elvis sheds the fat suit, gradually looks younger and younger.