TMB staff controlling access to stations on Metro Line 4 to avoid crowding on platforms and in corridors. Crowds of very young people checking their mobile maps at the Llacuna metro exit to find the shortest route to Bogatell beach and wondering whether to go around the Poblenou cemetery to the right or the left. Vendors selling unregulated beer who look like assistants for a cycling team. Police checkpoints searching for knives. Running around trying to stay close to the stage. Parents realizing they have no business being in the rites of passage into adolescence. Security officers who can't help but follow the rhythm of the music. The mayor of Barcelona, ​​Jaume Collboni, and people with more or less famous or powerful credentials moving around trays of food in the reserved area of ​​Estrella Damm next to the stage. Very young people checking the time to know when they'll have to leave in order to be on time for the concerts on Avenida Reina Cristina. Hungry journalists, who could be the grandparents of these same young people, are struggling to explain why a 21-year-old artist is capable of gathering a crowd on the beach on a humid night.

There's a particularly symbolic moment in Rigoberta Bandini's concert. After half a dozen songs and before the performance. In Spain we call it loneliness, takes off her wig. Is the simulation or the nightmare over? With the Palau Sant Jordi packed with an audience caught up in the melodramatic euphoria of the night, the post-pandemic diva began her performance with material from the disc Jesus Christ Superstar (2025)The staging was pure theater, as La Lupe would say, somewhere between the set of a 1960s music show and an old-fashioned game show. In this decadent pop setting, she seemed disoriented and on the verge of existential collapse. Everything was a bit precarious, even the sound quality, but it helped project the anguish and insecurity of CXT (Club Xavalas Tristes), which she played almost like a puppet. It was like Mari Trini realizing she doesn't want to be the diva everyone else wants her to be. And then an absurd character appears, a sort of toxic presenter who escaped from a rehab clinic. "Rigoberta Martínez," "Roberta," "Renata," "Robertita"… "She's a singer-songwriter," she says. It's so much of a simulation that it's almost grotesque. "Don't make us think, make us dance," the presenter shouts, who knows if she's representing the Witch of the West, the music industry, or the critics.

The live music industry is entering one of its most fruitful periods of the year in Catalonia. Despite a slight setback, Ticket sales revenue in 2024 was 138,577,703 euros., one of the highest figures in history. And a good part of this income corresponds to spring and summer, the time of festivals and stadium concerts.

The life of Paula Ribó (Barcelona, 1990) changed when she invented the character Rigoberta BandiniSuddenly she was an unexpected diva touched by pop and italodisco, hedonistic and decadent at the same time. Three years after compiling her achievements in the album The Empress (2022), returns with a double album, Jesus Christ Superstar, and the need to explore contradictions, such as "hyperfeminization and the search for Superwoman". Ribó-Bandini attends the ARA a month before starting a tour that will arrive at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona on June 28.

"The presenter is much popu"If not, there wouldn't be so many of us today," one of the more than two hundred people who had filled the garden of the La Central bookstore in Raval to the brim said to his companion. "Do you mean they don't come for Milena? She's also very famous," replied the woman crowded next to her. A few minutes late, Milena Busquets and the singer Rigoberta Bandini - alias of Paula Ribó - appeared to chat for a while about The sweet existence (Amsterdam in Catalan and Anagrama in Spanish), the new book by the writer who became a phenomenon thanks to This will also happen (2015), translated into more than twenty languages, in which she spied on a group of holidaymakers from Cadaqués through a narrative voice somewhere between frivolous and transcendent, sharing a good part of the author's life experiences.