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ABSTRACT
The 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games announced Spain’s democratic credentials and facilitated a vast urban regeneration project in the Catalan capital. There is extensive bibliography on the role played by culture in the forging of the so-called Barcelona model, but little attention has been paid thus far to popular music. Barcelona may lack Ibiza’s super-clubs, but, in the space of a generation, the city has gone from being a relative backwater to becoming a staple of major international tours, and music has increasingly become a popular tourist attraction. This is a logical albeit not necessarily intended consequence of Barcelona’s Olympic adventure. I begin with a preliminary survey of rock and pop concerts before exploring in the main section how and why live and recorded music performed a key but underexplored role in the success of the 1992 Olympic Games. A critical examination of the subsequent development of popular music in the Catalan capital will provide a means by which to grapple with the legacy of the Transition and Barcelona ’92 in post-recession Spain.
Acknowledgements
Simon Hall, a colleague from the School of History at the University of Leeds, kindly provided useful bibliographical tips for reading about the concept of years. I would like to express my gratitude to the offices of Gay Mercader and Pino Sagliocco (and in particular their personal assistants, Paqui Córdoba and Ozlem Ozseker) for facilitating information for this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Duncan Wheeler is Professor in Spanish Studies at the University of Leeds. He has held Visiting Professorships/Fellowships at the Universities of Oxford, California and Carlos III, Madrid, and is the Hispanic studies editor for the Modern Language Review. In 2016, he was inducted into the Spanish Academy of Stage Arts in recognition of his teaching of and research into Spanish theatre. Duncan’s publications include the monographs Golden Age Drama in Contemporary Spain: The Comedia on Page, Stage and Screen (2012) and Following Franco: Spanish Politics and Culture in Transition (2020), and he is the author of over fifty peer-reviewed academic articles and book chapters. A published translator, he also writes regularly for newspapers and cultural supplements such as JotDown, the London Review of Books, the Observer, the Revista de Libros or the Times Literary Supplement. Email: [email protected].
Notes
1 Two limited edition hardback chronicles of their careers also provide invaluable background material (Mercader Citation2017; Suárez Citation2009); see also Wheeler (Citation2014) for the most extensive published interview with Mercader.
2 Newspaper reports often indicate a higher occupancy for the festival, raising the number to over two hundred thousand, but that is because they count attendance by the same person on consecutive days multiple times.
3 Footage of the peaceful crowds gathering for the concert is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtSyrF1psCs. Last consulted on 8 May 2019.
4 He prefaces this recollection as follows:
Spain, only years after Franco’s death, was not the country it is today. Even in 1981, the room we played was surrounded by machine-gun-toting police. Outside, equipment from the back of our van disappeared up the street and laundry walked itself out of the hotel into the Barcelona night, never to be seen again. (Springsteen Citation2016, 288)
5 As Oriol Regàs, the owner of the infamous Boccaccio nightclub, recalls: “Era una ciudad más cosmopolita, donde se había filtrado ya el aire fresco que nos llegaba a través de Perpiñán” (Citation2010, 247). The artist Ouka Leele recalls: “En los años setenta, cuando yo empezaba a adueñarme de mi propia juventud, justamente en Barcelona, la cosa bullía. Ir allí era como salir fuera, no sé si de España pero fuera de algo, se saboreaba la libertad y la alegría” (as quoted in Nazario Citation2004, 190).
6 This is currently available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2xOHS68aZ0. Last consulted on 8 May 2019.
7 In the view of Ribas: “En la España del tardofranquismo cualquier hecho o teoría de los movimientos antiautoritarios llegaba en pequeñas dosis, tanto por la censura franquista como por la que ejercían los marxistas. Ambas ortodoxias los veían como una catarata de ideas sin jerarquía que podía arruinar su negocio” (Citation2011, 169).
8 Footage of this infamous recording is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDZqayFOiSw. Last consulted on 8 May 2019.
9 For a contemporary account of the musical and social significance of the concert by novelist Vicente Molina Foix, see Molina Foix and Cremades (Citation2014, 172–176).
10 My colleague Margarita Piñero, who worked in Tierno Galván’s cultural department, recalls there was almost invariably the amount stipulated in the official accounts to be paid to Mercader for his acts and then an additional undisclosed figure which was paid separately because the mayor did not want to admit publicly the extent to which taxpayers’ money was being used to subsidize concerts.
11 Information contained in Box No. 60290 of the Arxiu Municipal de Barcelona.
12 I have drawn on a telephone interview with Francesc Fàbregas conducted on 15 May 2019 for this section.
13 This information is taken from conversations with Elms at London’s Club Taurino, at which we were both invited to speak in 2015. I would like to thank the Club’s then secretary, David Penton, for organizing these events.
14 The supporting act was the German-based band Craaft, which featured Steve Buslowe. Meat Loaf’s bassist recalls how the atmosphere was less dangerous than in 1983 – when spectators had thrown coins at the artists onstage – and that the audiences were very loud and appreciative. Email sent to the author on 6 January 2014.
15 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYX0sjP6Za8. Last consulted on 8 May 2019.
16 For an oral history of the “ruta del bakalao”, see Costa (Citation2016).
17 When he returned to London, Oakenfold began with what he terms
the true Balearic sensibility. My interpretation of the Balearic beat is that you can play all kinds of music together; it doesn’t mean only tracks you’d heard on the island. I was playing a small amount of Ibiza tunes, and the rest of the night it gave me a chance to play all the other alternative stuff I was into. (As quoted in Norris Citation2007, 80)
18 As New Order’s bassist Peter Hook notes:
the acid of Chicago was but one element of the UK acid-house explosion in 1988. The scene had its roots as much in Balearic beat as it did in the Windy City and it stormed without focus, referencing 1960s hippy culture as well as house and techno and even early indie arrivals such as the Woodentops, Thrashing Doves and Finitribe. (Citation2010, 146)
19 Costello also recalls his first trip to Barcelona and witnessing a bullfight at the Monumental in his autobiography (Citation2016, 100–104).
20 Two of my friends who worked for MTV during the 1990s told me independently that money was built into the budgets for filming events in Ibiza to pay what amounted to bribes to the club association in order to facilitate licenses being granted. The established club owners at this time also largely controlled who was “permitted” to sell drugs in venues around the island.