This weekend the Primavera Sound festival came to São Paulo for
the second year running. I didn’t go last year despite a promising line-up and
it taking place just down the road, because I’m generally sceptical of the burgeoning
festival circuit here - which started with
Rock in Rio and has since come to include Lollapalooza, The Town and others, to
mixed reviews. I haven’t been to a gig, period, since Radiohead played the
Allianz Parque in 2018!
But The Cure were announced as headliners, and they’re one
of the few bands left on my concert bucket list, so we decided to get two
weekend tickets before the rest of the line-up was even announced. I was
expecting Blur to be the other headliner, since they were on the bill for
Primavera Argentina and Chile, but we got The Killers instead, to the excitement
of absolutely no one; apart from that though, the line-up was significantly
better than last year.
The line-up was a big deal because,
as much as I enjoyed my festival days at four consecutive Glastonburys, the
main draw was the music. In my experience, everything other than the music –
i.e. the hordes of people, the queues, the lack of basic facilities, the mud,
the sunburn – ranged from “rustic and charming” to “actively unpleasant”, and I’ve
only grown more intolerant and cosseted in my twilight years.
But to my surprise, Primavera
turned out to be genuinely pleasant and comfortable, even to an old fogey like
me. It was less like Glastonbury and more similar in scope to the Hyde Park
Calling one-day line-ups which I went to a few times back in their £2.50-ticket
heyday: three stages placed relatively close together in the middle of the
Interlagos F1 racetrack, urban infrastructure and transport links nearby, and everyone
goes home at the end of the day.
There was a food park with decent
grub, hammocks, a “welcome tent” where you could go and chill out on a sofa if
it all got too much, proper non-chemical toilets and – best of all – as much free
water as you could drink, all day long! Admittedly this last bit was probably
tacked on in a panic at the last minute, after a fan died of dehydration during
a recent Taylor Swift concert, but it really did make a huge difference and
probably prevented hundreds of less extreme cases.
There were also a load of corporate
tents trying their best to leverage the good vibes to sell sun cream or mayonnaise
or whatever, but they could be safely ignored and could only be accessed by queuing
anyway. They’d implemented an annoying cash-free system where you had to top up
your wristband in order to buy anything, but we got the hang of it eventually
and the topping-up lines were kept to a minimum.
On the downside, Interlagos is
still miles from anywhere, and the commute on Saturday via 3 tube lines and a
gruelling uphill trek in the midday sun was easily the least fun I had all
weekend. I also spent a lot more time standing up and walking between stages on
the Saturday, knackering my legs and leading me to wonder if I was going to
make it through another day. But on Sunday we drove down early and were lucky
enough to find a spot right next to the entrance, so getting away during the
closing exodus was pretty easy.
It occurred to me that a lot of these
amenities were laid on with the target audience in mind – there were a lot of folks
my age, with a much lower threshold for personal discomfort than your average
teenager. The line-up was noticeably more, er, “experienced” than other festivals
too – most of the bands on the bill were 20 or 30 years past their peak, and younger,
active artists were shunted down the running order and into the 1-5pm slots,
when most of the oldies would be sheltering from the sun and conserving their energy.
No complaints about the music
either. In unglamorous economic terms, I saw 8 shows by pretty big names over 2
days, for just over R$700 - almost 2013 prices! Counting down from worst to
best:
8/ The Killers – not Blur, and no one’s
favourite band, but obviously very good at what they do from what I saw before I
left early to beat the crowds. There was a real Tom Cruise vibe to frontman
Brandon Flowers, who ran around the stage grinning like a man possessed in a
pink Vegas suit, and exhorting everyone to have a good time a little too much.
Still, they were considerate enough to play their biggest and best song first (“Mr
Brightside”), sparing me any debate about whether to stay ‘til the end.
7/ Marisa Monte – a big hit with
the local crowd; I caught a bit of her set while waiting for another one to
start, and was relatively entertained, but left as soon as another gig started
on the next stage over.
6/ Slowdive – the kind of band that
only really has one song, but it’s a pretty good one. Not really suited to the late-afternoon
daylight slot they were given, but they earned a lot of goodwill by soldiering
on with the gig despite one of the singers getting a throat infection. Sounded
a lot more like The Cure than I remembered, albeit with much less distinctive vocals.
5/ Beck – had absolutely no idea
which Beck we were going to get (sad acoustic Beck? Chillwave Beck? Rap
Beck? Scientology Beck?); we ended up getting all of the above and more. A
fantastic greatest hits set that saw him roll back the years, work the crowd
like a pro, go on extended solo slide guitar and harmonica breakdowns, do some
light breakdancing, and touch on most of his back catalogue. Nothing from his
latest album, which is a little sad but probably for the best…
4/ Kelela – Such a great,
mesmerizing performance out of absolutely nowhere… With no backing band, a
minimal backdrop and an outrageous outfit she had the crowd in the palm of her
hand; she played mostly unreleased remixes of an album not many present would
have heard in the first place, and everyone loved it anyway.
3/ Carly Rae Jepsen – I made Gabi leave
the house hours earlier than she would have liked to catch the start of her
show – bafflingly scheduled for 3:30pm – so there was a lot of pressure on it
to be worth our while, and she absolutely delivered. Relentless positivity and
hit after hit in the glorious sunshine. Even Gabi, who had previously written
her off as “music for Gap changing rooms and rom-com makeover montages”, had to
admit it was a pretty good show. The best/funniest moment was when she came down
from the stage to get the crowd to sing into the mic for “Call Me Maybe”, only
to be met with stony-faced Cure fans who had been waiting there since the gates
opened to get a good spot for the headliners.
1/ The Cure – naturally, everyone
was here for the main event, and they did not disappoint. I have a few notes – playing
half an hour’s worth of unreleased songs during a festival headliner set is not
on, no matter how good they sounded, and the guitar part to “From the Edge of
the Deep Green Sea” sounded all wrong – but the band was having such a great
time that it seems churlish to complain. The set was probably the longest one I’ve
ever stood through (29 songs over almost 3 hours!). No one was forcing them to
play for that long, they just decided to do so out of sheer enthusiasm for
their own music.
There were hits galore (interspersed
throughout, then relentlessly at the end), rarities (“Want”! “Shake Dog Shake”!
“Charlotte Sometimes”!), a detour into their Goth origins (including 3 consecutive
tracks from “Seventeen Seconds”), tribal flute playing (“Burn”!), some misguided
but well-meaning attempts at Portuguese, and my all-time favourite Cure song in
the first encore (“Plainsong”). As a setlist it was an absolute embarrassment of
riches, and I’m not really sure what more they could have played (maybe “The
Kiss” as a third encore, if we’re being picky). It reminded me of that scene in
The Simpsons where Homer is sent to hell and condemned to eat doughnuts forever
as punishment for his gluttony, but he just ends up having a great time eating
endless doughnuts.
And that’s my write-up – we’re
still in recovery, but who knows, maybe we’ll be back in 2024!
