Sharing the joint with young people

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the Low Festival in Benidorm. Maggie, my partner, knows that I like festivals. She doesn't. She doesn't like the push and the shove and the constant standing and, generally, the music does nothing for her. She's decided on her favourite musicians now, and she pretty much sticks with them. She doesn't discount newer stuff; it's just that, generally, she finds it falls short of her established preferences.

I'm going to try to do a piece here on the accessibility of music, but I know I'm going to meander and wander around the houses. So, what I want to say is that music is very accessible in Spain. From local concerts by town bands to municipal festivals for pianists or guitarists, through any number of styles and formats of music supported by local town halls for no other reason than that they see it as their job to enrich the cultural life of their populations. In the bigger towns, small, commercial, performance spaces come and go and nearly all the theatres programme inexpensive musical events as an integral part of their offer. There are also an enormous number of, particularly, summer weekend festivals that have different bands each year but where the line-ups for each of the festivals can look remarkably similar.

I like festivals. As far as I'm concerned, they have several advantages. The first thing is that they are relatively cheap. If we'd gone up to Sonorama this year, the weekend pass would have been 85€, and there were over 150 performances (including the DJs) ranging from old-timers, through the established and nearly established bands to the up-and-comers, some of whom will never be heard of again. At a bit under €2 per performance that's a good deal. The second is that there are several bands on at once. As someone who finds listening to an album that lasts 40 minutes a bit of a chore, the concerts done by people like Bruce, Taylor, or the Stones that go on for hours and hours, seem to me, close to a violation of human rights. Spending twenty or thirty minutes watching one band is more than enough and festivals make it easy to do that because if you don't move on you'll miss the other band just around the corner. Finally, especially in the early evening, there will be bands that are hopeful, playing and singing their hearts out, determined to make an impression. If you went to see one of Bob Dylan's concerts last year, think exactly the opposite. He didn't give a toss about his audience or the quality of his performance. The odds are that, eventually, with some of those bands or artists, sometime in the future, you'll be able to say you saw blah de blah long before they were famous. You'll be able to relate how it was just you with friends and relatives of the band members - and look at them now!

There is a downside, of course. The headline bands are often on way past my bedtime. I'm really not up to being jostled by a bunch of drunken, hormone-driven, and drug-fuelled young people at four am. And as for the abusive beer and food prices and all those little tricks to wheedle money out of you, like charging for the non-returnable glasses, I will stay seal lipped. In fact, this time Maggie was only willing to go because the VIP tickets offered less crowded bars, easy access to the headline bands, and places to sit. In fact she suggested it!

To be honest, I've not been to that many festivals while I've lived here. We've done the Low in Benidorm three times, FIB in Benicassim a couple of times, I did the old SOS 4.8 in Murcia two or three times too, and just once at the B-Side in Lorca. We've considered other festivals much further from home but, as I said earlier, the line-ups tend to be very similar and hotel prices in the nearby towns are as abusive as the price for noodles or shawarma inside the festival site.

There are other festivals that don't follow the format of lots and lots of acts crammed into a weekend. Monkey Week down in Andalucia, for instance, or one we've been to four or five different years in Cartagena—the Mar de Músicas. There, the format is individual concerts, with higher prices and numbered seats, spread over a longer period and using two or three venues which sometimes leads to a forced decision about seeing this or that band. There are other festivals that put on a series of bands at the same venue over either days or weeks. Local examples are San Javier Jazz and Yecla Jazz (jazz festivals sometimes include wildly un-jazzlike bands) or like L'Escorxador in Elche which puts on bands over the weekends throughout the summer. And, of course, not all the festivals are "pop" - there are classical and folk as well as specialist performances like the flamenco down in La Unión for Cante de las Minas.

The local town fiestas used to be a rich seam of music. Somewhere as tiny as Pinoso has put on well-known names over the years, from Estopa and Izal through to David Bisbal and Sergio Dalma. In Yecla, I've seen bands like Viva Suecia and Alaska. Jumilla too used to have decent names, as did EMDIV in Elda (the photo at the top of Shinova is an old one from EMDIV though the band were on at the Low this year) or Aspe both for their fiestas and their music festival AspeSuena. We've seen lots of big-name bands, often for free, over the years but that seems to be becoming less and less usual, presumably due to budget cuts. And, of course, there is a constant trickle of decent or interesting acts that are put on by local municipalities for one reason or another. Our most recent concert was Soleá Morente, daughter to the legendary Enrique Morente and part of an important flamenco clan, at a venue with room for no more than a couple of hundred people. It was really good fun, especially at a whopping 8€ per ticket.

I'm not keen on going to see has-been bands that had their creative heyday thirty or forty years ago and are still limping along on their hits. I know most people don't agree and would turn out to see Sting, Madness, or Simply Red in preference to Cristina Len or Rodrigo Cuevas. They wouldn't do it for me; why go to see has-beens when you can go and see the potential bands of the future? There is an exception—I don't mind going to see people who I consider may die on stage—we saw Tom Jones do a fine job last year, just after that abysmal Dylan concert, and we went to see Raphael in Murcia a while ago and his new teeth and dyed hair gleamed just as they always have, even if he had a bit of trouble with some pesky high notes.

A damp squib

We've been to a few music festivals here in Spain - pop festivals, mainly indie bands - generally pretty close to home. I did investigate going to one near Burgos and another near Bilbao this summer but, even months ago, all the hotels were gone and we're far too old for that sleeping under canvas nonsense. A second factor in deciding against was that, when I did the sums and compared it to my monthly income, I decided that the best thing to do with the coming summer is to sit in the garden, perspire gently, listen to the cigarras sing and read books borrowed from the library.

Last century I worked for a youth club charity. We decided to hold a major fundraising event and we even hired an event organiser. She was well out of her depth and the event was destined to be a squalid failure. But the morning of the event dawned stormy and thundery; rain was falling in torrents. The event went ahead because everything was ready and there was no alternative. The dismal event and the financial losses were all put down to the weather.

In the book that we Britons call Don Quixote, often quoted as the masterpiece of Spanish literature, a work of two volumes with 1250 pages there is not a mention of rain. In Spain, if it rains, events are often scrubbed. Usually they are re-arranged but sometimes that's just the end of them. There's always next year.

I like festivals. I like the short sets and the multi stage thing. If one band isn't too good there is another to listen to and if they are no good either then there are vegetable noodles and falafels to buy. The truth is that I'm a bit old for festivals though. If I have to stand up for too long my back aches and my legs really begin to hurt. Maggie has a similar, but much more painful, problem with her hip. My contact lenses are another problem. They're fine till around 11 or maybe till midnight but, after fourteen or so hours in my eyes my blinking becomes non stop. There's another thing about later evening. The bar is now more battle ground like than earlier, the toilets are repulsive and the number of stoned (does one still say stoned for drugged up?) and drunk young people makes for more collisions and spilled drinks which have a negative effect on my good humour.

But I also have a theory. The headline bands at the festivals are probably doing alright. They probably spend their time travelling around the country in a Transit (does one still say a Transit as the generic for a mid sized van?) but they've given up the day job and they have a couple of albums behind them. They are, in a word, successful. And whatever happens tonight isn't going to change that. Their current reputation is made and their future will depend, not on tonight, but on their new songs and future albums.

The same isn't true of the bands at the beginning of the running order. If they do well tonight people might go out and buy their music (does one still buy music or does one simply steal it?) The opinion formers, looking for something to pad out their blogs, video channels and Instagram accounts, might say something nice about them. You can see, too, that the bands themselves get a buzz out of being on a big stage with a lot of kit. They put a lot of effort into doing as well as they can and they often look to be having a hoot of a time. Besides which the toilets are still smelling sweet, the bar is easy access and nobody is crashing into me because their motor control functions have been compromised.

We were going to a small festival in Elche this evening. The bigger bands, like Love of Lesbian and Sidonie, we've seen several times before, others, like Elefantes and Casa Azul, we've seen too but not so many times. Some of the bands on the running order like Kuve, Polos Opuestos, Atientas and Women Beat were all new to me. I was looking forward to it. Then, yesterday, via Facebook, not via the ticket agency that took my money, I find out that the event has been postponed and split in two with one day on the 20 April and another on May 12. We could have booked up lots of other things for this weekend but we didn't because of Elche Live. And why is the event cancelled? Because there is a high probability that it will rain this afternoon. Pathetic.