Majors Spring Up With Primavera

The European festival season has been running for a couple of months and the first of the major festivals will be Primavera Sound in Barcelona, Spain, May 26-29.

Primavera (or “Spring”) Festival is one of Spain’s biggest festivals, with a capacity of 35,000, and is traditionally Europe’s first major of the season. It’s quickly followed by Germany’s giant Rock Am Ring and Rock Im Park festivals (June 3-5), the 35,000-capacity Sweden Rock (June 8-11), the UK’s Download, Isle Of Wight, and Rockness festivals (June 10-12), and Pinkpop in The Netherlands (June 11-13).

Last year Primavera celebrated its 10th anniversary by bolting on a new conference called PrimaveraPro, which attracted 400 delegates and about 1,000 journalists.

Event programmer Almudena Heredero and her team are confident that this year it will draw twice as many to the city’s Hotel Me, where the conference programme closes as the festival starts at 5 p.m.

The success of PrimaveraPro, which also showcases new talent, is related to the fact the Spanish music industry has traditionally used the festival as one of its most important meeting points.

Heredero, who works for PR agency Followspot, says that last year the delegates were mainly from Spain, the UK and the U.S., although this year has more registrations from mainland Europe.

There’s also a strong South American contingent, partly because several Latin acts are on the showcase programme.

The conference runs parallel to the festival for five days and passes cost euro 200 ($284).

Bands playing this year’s Primavera Sound Festival include Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, Grinderman, Fleet Foxes, Pulp, PJ Harvey, Interpol and Yuck.