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Vice Blog

BARCELONA - A BROKEN LEG, A BROKEN BAND

Speaking of Brits and festivals, this one goes out to all the British people who pay upwards of £300 to sleep in a muddy concentration camp for three days while millionaire indie rock bands laugh and laugh and laugh at them.

Last week I got back from three days at the Primavera festival in Barcelona and I hereby declare it the best festival in Europe. The main reason being: it's almost completely free of British festivalgoers. There were no gangs of Dave-from-marketing weekend warrior clones, wandering around in packs, lardy bellies sticking out of too-tight indie shirts they outgrew when they left their shitty university course about marketing ten years ago, all pissed out of their minds on £5 lager and trying to cop off with girls half their age. No lame goth emo kids sulkily skulking around writing suicide slogans on their arms while waiting for a big corporate American rock band that wears make up to sing songs about suicide being brilliant.

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Instead, Primavera offers amazing things like "nice Spanish people with an even mix of girls and boys," "dry floors and stages that you could see and hear without standing in a pile of human shit while somebody puked on you," "amazing bands you actually want to see play," "free fucking booze everywhere," "nice hotels and apartments just around the site," and "plenty of good people to go absolutely crazy bananas with for three days without it going too pear-shaped."

When we got there we saw a few burned cars around Barcelona. The European Championship had been won the night before by the home team so the fans had celebrated pretty hard.

This is Chris standing on top of a burned-out car before we went to the festival.

Here's The Horrors on the first night, playing on the VICE stage.

This is My Bloody Valentine, taken from the side of the stage by Shaun Kendrick from ATP.

MBV were the loudest band of the festival by far. These are Kevin Shields' amps. Looks pretty straightforward, right?

Here's a small selection of his minimalist pedal set-up.

Beer was free everywhere at Primavera. It was pouring out of taps, bottles, bowls, hoses, and fountains.

Black Lips played the VICE stage on the Saturday night at 3 AM and ripped it to pieces. I'm not saying this because they're on our label. Ask anybody who was there. The brother of one of the kids from the Soft Pack loved it so much he broke his leg diving off the stage across the 15-foot barrier, straight into the ground. He spent the rest of the night turning green with blood dripping into his shoe, too embarrassed to tell anybody what he'd done.

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Sunn O))) was great as usual. I watched MBV with Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson from Sunn O))) and my old pal Andrew Hartwell from Aurora Borealis. We were in the huge "VIP area" that served free booze till like seven in the morning and contained about 2,000 people. There were surreal moments like listening to James Ford talking to O'Malley about producing guitar records, then having 18 Japanese tourists pap Kevin Shields while Pete Kember lurked in the background of the shot looking like a space-rock Nightmare Before Christmas.

This is Wavves coming off stage just after Ben Rayner helped them break up by giving them a load of strong aspirin or something

Fucked Up also played our stage. Damian's a dad now.

Thurston Moore's guitars.

This is Ben Rayner celebrating having broken up Wavves.

And this is Neil Young's set list (shot by Shaun Kendrick--he took all the side-of-stage stuff). Neil was amazing. He did stuff from Tonight's the Night, played "Down By The River" with what sounded like gospel singers, and ended on "A Day in the Life." Other great things were SunnO))), Jarvis, Spiritualized, Ghostface, and swimming in the tiniest pool in the world at the top of The Princess Hotel before the policeman came to stop us drinking rum.

Today they forecast a monsoon hitting Glastonbury! Viva Primavera!

ANDY CAPPER

(In no way was this shameless blow-job of an article paid for. Although I will consider offers in the future.)