Fito & Fitipaldis versus modern football at the Palau Sant Jordi

BarcelonaThere are many reasons to go to a concert. Surely, one of the reasons that moved more than 17,000 people to fill the Palau Sant Jordi on Friday was to be able to explain what they experienced with the song. Little sailor soldierIt was during the final stretch of the first of Fito & Fitipaldis' two concerts in Barcelona. Fito Cabrales had said yes, that they were experts, that they would sing it together. And the audience took him up on it and sang it from beginning to end, with particular intensity the saddest verse in history, the one that confirms that after a bad winter will come an equally bad spring. Little sailor soldierThe album, a chronicle of a man's resignation as he ages alone after two cruel disappointments—women don't fare well in some of the Basque musician's songs—was released in 2003 and resonates today beyond its generational impact. One of the most surprising aspects of the concert was the remarkable presence of a very young audience, deeply connected to a sound rooted in clean, polished rock 'n' roll, with Javi Alzola's saxophone alternating the spotlight with Carlos Raya's guitar, a devotee of the barricades of... riff and the rhythms of JJ Cale and Dire Straits. An audience, by the way, both male and female, with many young and not-so-young couples intensely experiencing the concert.

The Fito & Fitipaldis tour serves to present the album live. The Howling Mountain, represented at the Palau Sant Jordi by half a dozen songs, such as BacklitThe song that kicked off the two-hour concert. A friend of metaphors and transparent wordplay (like Rosendo), Fito opened the night projected precisely against the light on a curtain. When the curtain rose, a stage design that was, for now, countercultural was revealed: on stage there were only the six musicians, their instruments, and their amplifiers. And that was enough. And the screens, horizontal and square, almost a provocation in times of vertical screens that prioritize the frontman and render the band invisible. Everything about Fito & Fitipaldis seems like a natural challenge, like someone battling against modern football and, miraculously, succeeding: tickets, between 43 and 68 euros (below the usual 100 euros for other large-scale concerts); no premium area, no VIP section, the entire floor open to everyone; no confetti or propsAll the resources invested to ensure good sound. However, he doesn't boast about it; it's simply been this way since time immemorial. In a corridor of the Palau Sant Jordi, there's a banner with a picture of Fito from 2014, in which he's dressed exactly the same as in 2026.

With these tools, he fosters a sense of community, even more explicit when he performs songs that are sung while embracing, like The house from the roofAnd especially when he revives "the old custom," he says, of asking the audience to greet the audience of the next concert. Taking advantage of the frenzy at the end of Cheap whiskeyAs Diego Galaz's violin and Jorge Arribas' accordion enlivened the countryside after a break, the screen showed the Bilbao audience's greeting to the Barcelona crowd, and Fito urged the Sant Jordi crowd from Friday to do the same for the Sant Jordi crowd from Saturday. That's what it's called.

The audience is the differentiating factor. In the first part of the concert, the swing of The fish lives by its mouth. and the riff guitar that drives I would make the same mistake again.Two songs from 2006 provoked the first ovations, with the audience clinging to the revolt of the small things in the verse.I'm not going to wake up for the sun to rise."Wonderful, you guys are a fucking blessing," Fito said as he finished. On the horns of a dilemma (the only song he played from the album) Running away from myself(from 2014). And, after a while, the audience's appreciation was even louder afterI just arrived, another track from the album The fish lives by its mouth. It begins with a guitar solo by Fito himself and takes off into verse. These are the songs that solidified a style and a brand that permeated practically the entire concert repertoire.

An infallible full-back

Fito Cabrales is like the full-back who never ventures up the wing, who never loses his position, and who acts with a determination that drives forwards crazy. He never takes risks. He grows up near the penalty area of a rock sound that doesn't give an inch to the midfield; if anything, he allows himself a touch of rhythmic, guitar-driven darkness in new songs like The horror will return, which reflects on wartime devastation, or rescues Each time a corpse From the pit of monotony, with an E Street Band-style crescendo that ends with Coke Giménez playing guitar alongside the drummer. It's frustrating with the lack of imagination in new ballads like The most perfect nightBut he quickly wins back the fans by cutting off a pass into space and displaying the pirate flag of chipped cobblestone rock to regain Between two mothersFrom Platero y Tú, the one who sang with the raspiest voice.

He played on truly dangerous fields precisely when he wore the Platero y Tú jersey in the nineties, but since then he has earned the trust of members and supporters through his reliability. Fito & Fitipaldis is an Aristotelian group, established like no other in a golden moderation that moves both the most hardcore Extremoduro fan and the most sentimental follower of Joaquín Sabina. Less wild than one, with less literary flair and more streetwise than the other. An inexplicable phenomenon? Perhaps not so much.