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

BarcelonaRotisserie chickens. Dolphin-shaped balloons. Rolling on a wet floor. A rattle with bells. Songs performed with a gag. Absurd messages ("I sell an Opel Corsa"). Insurrectionary slogans ("Let's smash it all", like a Quimi Portet song). Dadaist customs. Rhymes 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 in 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 one, which took place in Fuengirola on April 25th, with a lot of presence of songs from the albums Enemigos de lo ajeno (1986), Como la cabeza la sombrero (1988), and Astronomía razonable (1993), but the whole thing 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 started 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 isn't going to go well," joked one of the singers. Walking up Montjuïc, there were glances of generational complicity among people with heroic working lives. "Women age better," said a spectator, noting the obvious reflected on the stadium floor. It is very likely that the same metro passengers would end 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 reheated dinner, and Manolo García has plenty of both to give away, 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 suit jacket 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 Catalan music, 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 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 over his jeans, looked like a botifarra player who didn't want to flaunt the money he had just won at the casino, perhaps not to mock the losers or to attract the attention of pickpockets. He gave a speech with that gruff irony, advised us not to multiply, that there were too many of us, 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 calligraphy that made the audience burst into admiration when the introduction of Mar antiguo played. García steals the glances, even though the screens generously show the whole band, but the special moments arrive when García and Portet look at each other and embrace, as they did at the end of

Llanto de pasión, one of the peaks of the night. It is these embraces that justify the comeback 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 went from less to more and much more. It began with Huesos and Conflicto armado, two reprises from Los Burros that lacked energy, as if the musicians dared not plunge headfirst into the sea of enthusiasm. Then came Querida Milagros, and the communion between the band and the audience reached the anticipated temperature. Remarkable was the audience's memory for recalling the lyrics of the songs. While Mi patria en mis zapatos and Sin llaves played, the screens showed strange snippets of Dadaist customs: some roast chickens, some sheep grazing... Giant fish hung on either side of the stage. And the subtitles, which Rosalía uses to display song lyrics, Portet and García thought it was worth having them to broadcast messages like "I buy gold", "collective catharsis", and "confused gentleman found near the stage." Naive absurdity in times of foreign emperors.

As could be expected, the audience's reaction intensified as the crown jewels appeared. The rain was a nuisance, 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 it stopped raining, a pleasant respite after the water had left a part of the stage quite wet. When it started again, García, as reckless as a handball goalkeeper, decided to integrate the rain into the show. He splashed like a child while singing Sara, he came down from the stage to approach the audience while Canta por mí played, and got thoroughly soaked, of course. Him putting on a bathrobe over his head to try to 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 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 sueños, which García performed brandishing a stick with jingle 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 Olympic Stadium 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 flew and the stadium was a clamor of verses about being from Barcelona and dying of heat and the claws 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.