54,999 smiles and a ‘bitter’

Do you know when you’re a teenager and you want to please so much that you spray yourself with cologne from head to toe, making what should be a seductive effect end up making you dizzy? Well that was the farewell concert of Oques Grasses last night at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys. Maybe the problem is that they have had too much time to think about what they were going to do and they wanted to do everything.

Just now a year ago, Josep Montero’s band announced (it had been rumored for months) that they were breaking up. Goodbye to a fourteen-year career that would have its end with a concert at the Estadi Olímpic. A risky decision, since the Lluís Companys is reserved for names that are written in capital letters (until then only three Catalan artists had managed/dared to convene their parish at the top of Montjuïc: Estopa, Aitana and El Último de la Fila), but not entirely crazy: Oques Grasses They are the benchmark band of their generation and many of their songs have transcended authorship to become popular cultural heritage (“La gent que esteem” is the “Boig per tu” of the 21st century).

Tickets for that last dance scheduled on October 10th flew out in seconds. What came next was a kind of collective madness, a paradigm of the biorhythms of today’s society. It was the FOMO (and the good songs, of course) that caused those from Osona to end up scheduling four gigs at the Olímpic with all the tickets sold. That is, 220,000 people singing “a cor que vols” that all they want is to see elephants fly. In Barcelona only Coldplay had previously been able to do this.

Yesterday’s concert was supposed to be the first of the four, but with Barcelona converted into a Southeast Asian city in the middle of the monsoon season, the storm that fell on Monday forced the gig to be put on the only day left free in this series of four: Thursday. Yesterday the weather thing was also looking bad. In the end only a few drops fell during the afternoon. Everything moved forward.

Josep Montero appeared alone at the top of the secondary stage. Strumming his little guitar. Singing “Córrer pels camps”. He looked nervous, as if overwhelmed by his surroundings and his circumstances, with an emotional hangover. What came next was a commitment to the continent more than the content, with Oques Grasses replicating all the tics that are presupposed in all stadium shows: dizzying visuals, pyrotechnics, choreographies, B stages for acoustic sets, symphonic arrangements with which to hyperbolize their creations… Too many stimuli for a repertoire that is overflowing with overused songs, and of which yesterday they reviewed a long twenty of them: from “Petar-ho” to “Sort de tu”, passing through “Sta guai”, “Elefants”, “Pingpong”, “In the Night”, “La gent que estimo”… An unbeatable sample that does not need so much perfume to intoxicate us.

But you know what? I looked around and everyone was dancing with a Matutano potato smile on their face. 54,999 people feeling extreme happiness at the farewell of their favorite band. The thing is about that and the strange one must be me because, although I didn’t connect yesterday, I will also miss them.