Primavera has, over the last four years, become a sort of Catalan ATP to the Reading/Leeds of Sónar or Benicàssim - challenging, innovative and unfailingly brilliant. Many of its six stages nearly slip off the tarmac and into the sea, a sharp salt tang fizzing in the air, catamarans and gulls gliding languidly by.

Young Marble Giants photographed by Amos Memon

This is a year dominated by the old guard. Despite a programme that reads like Pitchfork’s buzz list, Young Marble Giants, whose sole LP, Colossal Youth, came out nearly three decades ago, deliver the performance of the festival, if not the year. They’re less a live epiphany (they’re almost motionless on stage) than a stark reminder of what it means - what it should mean - to be an artist, to be human, to struggle to understand one’s place in the universe. They’re as seminal as Joy Division but without the relentless namechecking and photogenic biopics; as enraged and engaged, but delivering their barbed commentary with clenched-jaw, shiver-inducing minimalist restraint. There’s an extraordinary frisson to watching a quartet of 40-somethings, professionally obsessed with the fleeting moments of youth, excavate the fruit of their adolescence from the amber it was set in after an untimely 1980 dissolution. Playing with a live drummer instead of, famously, a slightly crap homemade drum machine, their sound is more rounded live than on record, but no less resonantly vacant. Alison Statton’s crystalline but deliberately unpolished vocals float above the high, melodic bass and rumbly rhythm guitar, the two almost impossible to untwine. They close with “Credit in the Straight World”, still the sharpest interrogation of underground culture of the last 50 years. As reunions go, this is as magical, as untainted by the passage of time, as anyone could hope for. Continue Reading