The Last of the Row pays off a debt at the Olympic Stadium

BarcelonaRoast chicken. Dolphin-shaped balloons. Rolled around on a wet floor. A rattle with bells. Songs performed in a tunic. Absurd messages ("For Sale: Opel Corsa"). Insurrectionary slogans ("We trample everything", like a song by Quimi Portet). Dadaist costumbrismo. 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 the ephemeral stage reunion of both at the tribute concerts for 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 25th, with a large presence of songs from the albums Enemigos de lo ajeno (1986), Como la cabeza al sombrero (1988) and Astronomía razonable (1993), but it all had an unrepeatable character, if only 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 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 working lives. "Women maintain ourselves 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 insightful spectator was one of the more than 55,000 people to whom García dedicated the final applause after two and a quarter hours of performance.

Nostalgia calls for euphoria and effectiveness to avoid falling into the reheated stew, and Manolo García has both in spades, 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 the 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 right at the start of the concert. 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.

Next to him Quimi Portet, dressed in a shirt worn outside his jeans, looked like a brisca player who didn't want to flaunt the money he had just won at the casino, who knows if to avoid shaming the losers or to avoid attracting the attention of pickpockets. He gave a speech with that grim irony, recommended that we don't multiply, that we are many, and greeted Quim Monzó, the prologue writer of the book Cançons en bell llemosí (1987-2020). Musically, he is all neatness, making precise drawings with his guitar, with that characteristic handwriting that made the audience erupt in admiration when the introduction of Mar antiguo played. García draws the gazes, although the screens generously show the whole band, but the special moments arrive when García and Portet look at each other and hug, as they did at the end of Llanto de pasión, one of the peaks of the night. These are the hugs that justify the return tour of El Último de la Fila.

The magic of 'Silver Planes' and 'Sweet Dreams'

Whether intentional or not, the concert followed a dynamic that started slow and built to a crescendo. It began with Huesos and Conflicto armado, two songs from Los Burros that lacked 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 anticipated temperature. What a memory the audience has for recalling song lyrics! While Mi patria en mis zapatos and Sin llaves played, the screens showed strange fragments of Dadaist everyday life: roasted chickens, sheep grazing... Giant fish hung on either side of the stage. And the supertitles, which Rosalía uses to display song lyrics, Portet and García thought it was worthwhile to have them to display messages like "Compro oro" (I buy 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 be expected, the audience's reaction intensified as the crown jewels appeared. The rain was bothersome, but it didn't stop the stadium from singing Aviones plateados and No me acostumbro with emotion, and from 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 (God of the rain), the rain stopped, 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 around like a child while singing Sara, came down from the stage to get closer to the audience while Canta por mí played, and got thoroughly soaked, of course. Him putting on a bathrobe to try and dry himself while continuing to sing was another of those decisions that are only made when you've understood that when necessity enters through the door, aesthetics leave through the window.

The main part of the concert ended with a powerful Lejos de las leyes de los hombres and the wonderful Dulces sueños, which García performed brandishing a rattle with bells and which included three special guitar solos: one by Quimi Portet, another by Josep Lluís Pérez (historic member of El Último de la Fila) and a third by Sara García, Manolo García's daughter. The tour band, which has another date at the Estadi Olímpic on the 7th, is solid and attentive to improvisations and the audience's voices, and is completed by bassist Antonio Fidel, drummer Ángel Celada, guitarist Pedro Javier González, percussionist and keyboardist Juan Carlos González, and backing vocalists Irene Miller and Elena Reina.

The encore followed the same dynamic. A relative calm before linking Como un burro amarrado en la puerta del baile and Insurrección while dolphins and confetti flew and the stadium was a clamor of verses about being from Barcelona and dying of heat and the clutches of uncertainty. "Visca, Barcelona. Visca, Catalunya. It has been a pleasure", said García, who, as he usually does in his concerts, closed the night singing El rey. Debt settled.