There’s a reason why we don’t really do ‘specials’. They’re a lot of hard work, for one, and finding something worth making a special about isn’t much easier. Primavera Sound – Barcelona’s answer to ATP, if ATP was twice the size and infinitely less Butlins – is a very special festival, though. The fact that it’s in Barcelona helps, by the sea where boats bob by to leftfield sonic delights, avant-garde walls of sounds and the fizz of many, many lo-fi indie bands. The lineup seems to constantly be a coup, only of course it isn’t, because Primavera has been doing this for the last eleven years straight. There’s no campsite arson, perhaps because there’s no campsite; the portaloos have coat hooks and paper; the tat stalls sell records and limited screen prints, not jester hats and legal highs. It’s as classy as it is punk. So this year we saw Primavera Sound as a chance to catch up with some past interviewees, like tUnE-yArDs and Battles, and meet some new ones, like Baths and Prince Rama and Moon Duo and The Fresh & Onlys. Because all of the bands stay in the same hotel across the street from the site? Sure.
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The week that this issue of Loud And Quiet was going to press, Carl was hanging his MA exhibition, marking the end of his time studying Communication Design Illustration at Central Saint Martins College, and he still got his commission to us in time. You can see it when you turn over the page, and more of his work at www.carlpartridge.co.uk. Take a look – Carl likes candy. He’s also a cream soda connoisseur and irreverent music lover. “Ideas within my work often stem from things I cannot do or places I’ve never been to,” he says, which explains his Time Machine illustration, while his Skatepark Kids look like dishevelled South Park regulars.
Kate knows every single band in Leeds, or at least that’s how it seems. She’s tipped us off about tons of the city’s bands, the latest being Δ, which is the symbol you get when you hold down alt and J on your keyboard. Before now they were called Films, which is a far more boring name. Kate’s been finding and interviewing new bands for nearly seven years, and when she’s not spewing them over the pages of Art Rocker and Loud And Quiet she’s doing so on her blog, Extremely Loud Incredibly Close. Away from the music, Kate is “a proper closet old lady”, who likes reading spy books and drinking tea. Kate recently joined the WI.
We met Dan when we co-hosted Crocodiles’s first UK tour in 2009. He very kindly put us up for the night in a flat covered in Bowie, Reed and Stooges records. He lives in Sheffield, so his place was twice the size and less than half the price of ours. Since then, Dan has founded online magazine KickingAgainstThePricks.com, which is updated with a new issue once a month. For our issue, this month Dan interviewed Baths and The Fresh & Onlys as part of our Primavera Sound coverage. They went a lot better than when Nick Cave told him to “ask something worth fucking asking”, although Dan “perversely quite enjoyed that.”
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