Primavera Day 2

My conference finished at 1pm on the Friday of the festival so I was making my way to the Primavera site by 4pm. I heard some Glasweigan accents on the underground and started talking to 3 blokes from Greenock. They were all fairly cool and essentially adopted me for the rest of the festival.

I had one major disappointment on Friday. Low were playing 'the great destroyer' in the indoor rock auditori and I didn't manage to get in to see them. This fucked me off bigstyle especially after I stood in line for nearly an hour in an attempt to get a ticket. It also pissed me off that I had to pay an extra 2 Euros to get into the auditori after I'd already spent 130 quid on a primavera ticket.

After the Low failure I contined to hang out with the Greenock guys. They were making a film about the festival and interviewing random people. They tried to get me to explain how to perform a lobotomy on camera. I politely declined to provide that footage. They were also trying to film a few bands where possible.

The bands on Friday were fairly good. I saw cocorosie perform a couple of stripped down numbers on a small stage although I couldn't really focus on their main set on a larger stage. They were just a bit too out-there. I barely recognised some songs that I really like from their CDs.

I watched a bit of Thee Ooh Sees on the vice stage. They were OK but they didn't blow me away initially. They were much better the following day when they played at the Parc de Joan Miro in town. I also watched a sunny day in glasgow who are not from Glasgow but were agreeable enough. I enjoyed them more in the Parc de Joan Miro the following day.

I watched Wire later on and I liked them. I've got several of their early albums but I didn't recognise much of what was played on stage. I guess that doesn't really matter cos they were great.

One of the best sets came from Michael Rother and friends (including steve shelley of sonic youth) performing the music of neu! I had a great seat in the ATP arena on the stone seats to the right of the stage. I had an unobstructed view of the stage beautifully framed by the sea. I own a couple of neu CDs and this set reminded me to listen to them more. The sound was great and the crowd loved it.

Later on I watched Les Savy Fav. I'm a big fan of them, I own about 5 of their CDs but for various boring reasons I've never managed to see them. They delivered in a spectacular way with singer Tim Harrington taking the stage dressed as a dog. He then spent a lot of the time running around the crowd promoting chaos. Entropy in action. The band was tight and the sound was shit hot.

Shellac came on after Les Savy Fav. This was my third opportunity to see Shellac and they were great as usual. I took some good photos and enjoyed the show. If I get my shit together I'll put up some photos here.

Finally I caught the end of the pixies set. Shellac were obviously my priority so I missed the first 20 minutes but I enjoyed what I saw. The Spanish crowd were loving it. A couple of drunken English girls approached me and tried to make me drink rum. One of them tried to snog me but I resisted.

Generally it was a good day.