Cruïlla Festival 2024 – 13 July 2024 (Parc del Forum – Barcelona)

After a day of concerts on Friday with Kasabian and Amaral, Saturday was the big day for the Cruïlla 2024 line-up, with performances by The Smashing Pumpkins, Pet Shop Boys and Johnny Marr.

The Smashing Pumpkins, Cruïlla 2024 – Photo courtesy of the Cruïlla Festival organisers

The evening began on the Vueling stage with the Trio Marala, who gave one of the most colourful and lively concerts of the festival. Accompanied at times by Maria Hein, a choir, a percussion group, a dance school and even the Navarrese singer Zetak, their concert gathered pace from the great song ‘El Desich‘ to a grand finale with ‘Entre carn i os‘, where the cohesion of the voices with Pello de Zetak stood out, ‘Ramo verde‘ and ‘Disimula‘.

Marala, Cruïlla 2024 – Photo courtesy of the Cruïlla Festival organisers

Their finale would coincide with The Tyets on the main stage. In a year marked by the organisation’s clear commitment to new mainstream music in Catalan, as evidenced by the schedules given to the band from Mataró and Oques Grasses, the duo turned the festival upside down for an audience that included a large number of children, ending their concert with three of their best-known hits: ‘Olivia‘, ‘Bailoteo‘ and ‘Coti x Coti‘.

The Tyets, Cruïlla 2024 – Photo courtesy of the Cruïlla Festival organisers

Next it was time to go back a few decades, as suggested by Johnny Marr. It is surprising how different the Brit’s approach to festivals is from his room shows, for while at the latter he does a good job of showcasing his solo discography, at shows like Saturday’s it is the songs from his time with The Smiths that make up almost 70% of the set. This way we could karaoke hits like ‘Panic‘, ‘This Charming Man‘, ‘How Soon Is Now‘ or ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out‘, although the best song of the night was the funny ‘Easy Money‘, where the Mancunian even dared to do some shy dancing. By the way, what the hell is the cover of Iggy Pop’s ‘The Passenger’ doing in the concert?

Johnny Marr, Cruïlla 2024 – Photo courtesy of the Cruïlla Festival organisers

Once again, the crowd flocked to the main stage to reunite with fellow Brits Pet Shop Boys, who returned to the Catalan festival after their performance in 2017 and in almost the same place where they played on the opening day of Primavera Sound 2023 last year. It’s hard to be surprised by the Londoners’ show, which, apart from changing a few tracks to accommodate a block of three songs in a row from their latest album Nonetheless (2024), opened in style with “Suburbia” from rather slow rhythms such as those of the soporific “Rent” or the synthesizers of “So Hard”. By the time they managed to solve the small volume problems that were hampering the power of their concert, many people had already moved on to the Occident stage. which had become incredibly small before the avalanche of people waiting for The Smashing Pumpkins. However, the wait for the American band was grotesquely prolonged when Pet Shop Boys went 20 minutes over their allotted time and played four classics including ‘Go West‘, ‘It’s a Sin‘, ‘West End Girls‘ and ‘Being Boring‘, ending a concert full of hits but with the ugly detail of delaying the whole festival by 25 minutes.

Pet Shop Boys, Cruïlla 2024 – Photo courtesy of the Cruïlla Festival organisers

Billy Corgan‘s band had a safe bet in front of an eager audience, and they didn’t disappoint. With a setlist that surprisingly included up to five songs from their latest album Atum: A Rock Opera in Three Acts (2023), The Smashing Pumpkins delivered a powerful and heartbreaking sound from the opening track ‘The Everlasting Gaze‘. After covering U2 with ‘Zoo Station‘, the first hit of the evening was ‘Today‘, to gradually deliver, in a first half that passed very quickly, ‘Tonight, Tonight‘, ‘Disarm‘ or ‘Ava Adore‘, in which the singer was accompanied on stage by his 8-year-old son and his 6-year-old daughter, leaving a magnificent contrast very Instagrammable to see a man in a cassock dancing happily with his children. The second part of the show would take us to the madness of ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings‘, the nostalgia of ‘1979‘ or an insurmountable final bang with the guitars and distortions of ‘Cherub Rock‘ and ‘Zero‘, songs that would immediately take us back to the mid-90s when, as teens, we would let out our anger by singing every single song from Siamese Dream (1993) or Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995).

The Smashing Pumpkins, Cruïlla 2024 – Photo courtesy of the Cruïlla Festival organisers

This is how Cruïlla 2024 came to an end for us, demonstrating the consolidation of the post-pandemic festival model established by its organisers, with the first two days dedicated to urban and Latin music respectively, and two days at the weekend, which this year seemed to attract a larger audience than in previous years. Although the shows by Avril Lavigne and Pet Shop Boys don’t seem to have reached the level of some supposed headliners for very different reasons, this year’s edition has given us spectacular concerts such as those by Kasabian, The Smashing Pumpkins, Amaral and Marala, so we are already starting to count the days left until Cruïlla 2025, where the 15th anniversary of the Festival will be celebrated.