Maybe it’s because the master’s eye makes the horse fat, he wanted to check that the doors opened punctually at 17:45 (they did), he wanted to put a face to the people he works for or simply that chance took him there, but on Saturday afternoon Jordi Herreruela, director of Cruïlla, was walking along the entrances. He had a satisfied look on his face and quickly said “we believe that we already have the model, that there is a public that habitually comes to our call and that feels comfortable with us every year.” With the public flowing orderly through the entrances, Herreruela entered his festival. Later he put figures to the satisfaction, for him the qualitative is always more important than the quantitative, and that is why he celebrated without fanfare that the 77,000 people who attended the festival this year, which sold all the tickets on the last day, represent a record attendance of just a few hundred spectators.
According to its figures, there were 25,000 attendees on Saturday, 22,000 on Friday, 15,000 on Thursday and 15,000 on the opening day. Considering that the festival is not looking to grow much further, Herreruela credits Cruïlla for how and why it is done, the comfort of the public and a varied programme that caters to multiple tastes. On the verge of adolescence, next year it will be 15 years old, its director pointed out “in the same way that those of us who are parents know that at that age our children begin to stop belonging to us, our festival is already more about Barcelona and its public than about ourselves”. We can only hope that Cruïlla behaves with an adolescence that does not unhinged.
Inside the venue, the atmosphere was the same as in every edition, although the age of the audience increases every year. Don’t think that this is a festival for adults, because on Saturday groups like Ginestà or The Tyets mobilized a young audience, but it is not a festival for twenty-somethings. In reality, it is a festival in which a very diverse and overwhelmingly local group coexists. The English are an exoticism. To remind us that despite all this, this is Barcelona, a cruise ship was silhouetted on the horizon while Ginestà began its concert, a kind of reincarnation of the most innocuous part of the festival. Catalan pop. Topics such as From all over the world either In bats They got the audience moving, and in these cases they danced by jumping around. Their singer, Pau Serrasolsas, appealed to the historical moment, but it was not clear if it was because they were there, because there was an audience or because it was six o’clock. Things of emotion.
The Tyets’ verbena
Later, The Tyets confirmed their post-festival character, a way of making music, also danced to by jumping, that hybridizes pop, reggaeton, hip-hop aesthetics and impudence. Hedonistic lyrics that seek pure celebration round off their proposal, which at Cruïlla concentrated the first crowd in front of its main stage. The couple from Mataró seemed ideally festival-like, music that can be listened to without concentration, that arrives by lacking edges and evoking pure partying. They started with The beach and Minorcatimely summer themes, and reserved for the end Olivia, Biloteo and Coti x coti. The verbena today sounds urban with The Tyets.
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And between concert and concert, before Calexico (from Tucson) had proposed the soundscape of Breaking Bad With their bilingual border music, the audience strolled under straw hats that the organisers had handed out the day before. They protected themselves from the sun hidden behind the clouds, on a not-too-hot day that promised a cool night. Street fruit vendors emphasised the sustainable and local nature of a festival that boasts of this, as well as not using fossil fuels to feed itself, connected as it is to the grid. At night it was the turn of Pet Shop Boys and Smashing Pumpkins.
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