El Último de la Fila settles a debt at the Olympic Stadium

BarcelonaRoast chickens. Dolphin-shaped balloons. Rolled around on a wet floor. A club with bells. Songs performed with varnish. Absurd messages ("For Sale: Opel Corsa"). Insurrectionary slogans ("We'll smash it all", like a song by Quimi Portet). Dadaist customs. Ballads connected to an immortal memory. Pre-modern sense of humor. And a Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium packed to the rafters so that El Último de la Fila could settle a debt with nostalgia thirty years after Manolo García and Quimi Portet went their separate ways, and ten years after their brief stage reunion at the tribute concerts to Los Burros and Los Rápidos.

The second concert of El Último de la Fila's comeback tour covered practically the same repertoire as the first, which took place in Fuengirola on April 25, with a strong presence of songs from the albums Enemigos de lo ajeno (1986), Como la cabeza la sombrero (1988), and Astronomía razonable (1993), but it all had an unrepeatable character, at least because the rain became another element of the staging, and, of course, because Barcelona is the home where the group's uniqueness exploded more than forty years ago.

The concert, in fact, had begun on the metro at a quarter past seven in the evening when some passengers sang Insurrección a cappella, with more enthusiasm than accuracy. "This concert won't go well," joked one of the singers. Walking up Montjuïc, there were glances of generational complicity among people with heroic work lives. "Women age better," said a spectator, noting the evidence reflected on the stadium floor. It is very likely that the same metro passengers ended the concert accompanying Manolo García singing Insurrección with the energy of someone who still believes it's worth fighting for just causes. And the perceptive spectator was one of the more than 55,000 people to whom García dedicated the final applause after two hours and a quarter of performance.

Nostalgia calls for euphoria and effectiveness to avoid falling into the reheated dish, and Manolo García has both in abundance, as he also demonstrates in concerts under his own name (and in which he often sings songs by El Último de la Fila). At 70 years old, and dressed in a blazer and scarf, he is an exultant frontman with a solid and expressive voice, unfiltered dopamine with a contagious effect. He repeated dedications he makes on his own tours (to music in Catalan, to farmers and to the self-employed) and received the same ovation. He looked very happy, and happiness spread through the stadium, like the glasses he threw to the audience as soon as the concert began. He has so much experience, so much, that in the encore, when he finished Los ángeles no tienen hélices, he scolded the audience: "Don't applaud me, I sang the first part of the song with my ass." And he asked the musicians to do it again.

Beside him, Quimi Portet, dressed in a shirt over his jeans, looked like a tute player who doesn't want to flaunt the money he just won in the casino, who knows if to avoid shaming the losers or to avoid attracting pickpockets. He gave a speech with that sly irony, advised us not to multiply, that there are many of us, and greeted Quim Monzó, the prologist of the book Cançons en bell llemosí (1987-2020). Musically, he is all neatness, making precise drawings with the guitar, with that characteristic calligraphy that made the audience erupt in admiration when the introduction of Mar antiguo

played. García gets the attention, although the screens generously show the entire band, but the special moments come when García and Portet look at each other and hug, as they did at the end of Llanto de pasión, one of the highlights of the night. These are the hugs that justify El Último de la Fila's comeback tour.

The magic of 'Silver planes' and 'Sweet dreams'

Whether done intentionally or not, the concert followed a dynamic that went from less to more, and to much more. It began with Huesos and Conflicto armado, two throwbacks from Los Burros that had little energy, as if the musicians dared not dive headfirst into the sea of enthusiasm. Then came Querida Milagros, and the communion between the band and the audience reached the expected temperature. How good the audience's memory is for recalling song lyrics! While Mi patria en mis zapatos and Sin llaves played, the screens showed strange snippets of Dadaist everyday life: some roasted chickens, some sheep grazing... Giant fish hung on both sides of the stage. And the subtitles, which Rosalía uses to display song lyrics, Portet and García thought it was worthwhile to have them to broadcast messages like "compro oro" (buying gold), "catarsis colectiva" (collective catharsis), and "se ha encontrado señor confundido al lado del escenario" (confused gentleman found next to the stage). Naive absurdity in times of strange emperors.

As could not be otherwise, the audience's reaction became more intense as the crown jewels appeared. The rain was bothersome, but it did not prevent the stadium from singing with emotion Aviones plateados and No me acostumbro, and raising the chorus of El loco de la calle with the impetus of youth that, indeed, has the desire to live. Just before Dios de la lluvia it stopped raining, a pleasant respite after the water had left a part of the stage quite wet. When it returned, García, as reckless as a handball goalkeeper, decided to integrate the rain into the show. He splashed like a child while singing Sara, went down from the stage to approach the audience while Canta por mí played, and got quite wet, of course. Him putting on a bathrobe over himself to try to dry off while continuing to sing was another of those decisions that are only made when you've understood that life is a game and that when necessity enters through the door, aesthetics go out the window.

The main part of the concert ended with a powerful Lejos de las leyes de los hombres and the marvelous Dulces sueñosThe main part of the concert ended with a powerful The encore followed the same dynamic. A relative calm before linking Como un burro amarrado en la puerta del baile and Insurrección while dolphins flew and the stadium was a clamor of verses about being from Barcelona and dying of heat and the grip of uncertainty. "It has been a pleasure," said García, who, as he usually does in his concerts, closed the night singing El rey. Debt paid.