Porto, Portugal’s second-largest city, is known for a few things: port wine, Super Bock, that one big bridge everyone you know has put on their Instagram story at least once. There’s also an excellent Tram Museum, if you’re ever in the area. Most importantly for us, though, it’s the city home to Primavera Porto, the Portuguese arm of one of Europe’s biggest festivals.
Cherry-picking from Primavera’s Barcelona mothership, Fontaines D.C. are the first heavy hitters of the weekend, striding onto the main stage as the sun sets behind them. A band who have gone truly international since the release of fourth album ‘Romance’ last year, there are nearly as many Fontaines t-shirts as there is Charli merch on display in the crowd. ‘Jackie Down the Line’ gets the first of many big singalongs, but the crowd don’t stop from there on in.
It isn’t all bombast, though. Quieter moments are scattered throughout the set, with new song ‘It’s Amazing to be Young’ proving especially poignant. This is a band who have steadily built their sound, and it’s a testament to their strength that early track ‘Boys in the Better Land’ can be sandwiched between fourth album belter ‘Nabokov’ and starry-eyed lovesong ‘Favourite’ without any of the three losing their punch.
With a day ticket price-point far lower than a Charli xcx headline show, it feels like a lot of Thursday’s crowd are here for one thing only – or maybe two, if you count the bar which exclusively sells caipirinhas. Brat green is on display everywhere, and the main stage crowd is gargantuan way before Charli is due to start.
When she does arrive, she does so with the force of a battering ram. Brat Summer may have been last year, but this is no career retrospective, and Charli is very much in Club Classics mode. The Shygirl remix of ‘365’ goes into ‘360’ with barely a pause for breath, and when Charli shouts, “Are you fucking ready to party or what?!”, the response can probably be heard several cities away.
There’s a sense that whatever she did, this is a crowd who would lap it up, but it’s a testament to Charli that the show is really, really good. A year into touring the same album, this could easily feel like an immaculately choreographed but ultimately disinterested spectacle. There’s a sincerity on display that elevates it beyond that, with Charli refusing to rely on the fervour of the crowd to carry her along. The only real question left unanswered is what comes next for her because it’s going to be nigh-on impossible to top this.
Once the xcx dust has settled, Waxahatchee is on hand to soothe aching heads with a sunny, country-flecked performance which leans heavily on her two most recent albums, ‘Tigers Blood’ and ‘Saint Cloud’. Music to sway along to in the afternoon sunshine; it’s a world away from the chaos of the night before.
On the festival’s smaller stages, cult band Los Campesinos! are proving they aren’t just for diehards with a tight set which causes more than a few mosh pits to break out, while buzzy newcomers Been Stellar prove themselves more than worth the hype by drawing a strong crowd at a time when half the punters haven’t made it onto the festival site yet.
Speaking of hype, Wet Leg are a pretty good indication of how to ride the wave of early attention and come out the other side. Turns out the best thing to do is write a load of really good songs – who knew? Opening with ‘Catch These Fists’, singer Rhian Teasdale is flexing her muscles and bounding around the stage, officially banishing the band’s earlier cottagecore aesthetic in favour of Cyberdog-adjacent Y2K visuals. ‘Wet Dream’ follows immediately afterwards, marking the start of a set which is impressively heavy on absolute bangers, considering the band still haven’t even released album two yet. Ending on the one-two punch of ‘Chaise Longue’ and new single ‘CPR’, there’s a feeling that this is a band whowill be eying up headline slots before very long.
On a stage facing onto a natural slope, Haim give the impression of a band playing in an open-air theatre. It’s a layout that means the whole audience gets a great view, but it must be pretty intimidating to look out at the crowd and see every single one of them looking back at you. Not that Haim seem bothered, playfully interacting with audience members between songs and promising to marry “every single one of you”. ‘Relationships’ is a highlight, with love-life horror stories written out on the screen behind the band, while “can we have some more sax in the next song?” scrolls across before ‘Summer Song’ opens with an extended saxophone solo.
Closing the festival for many is hardcore’s breakout success story, Turnstile. Coming straight from headlining London’s Outbreak festival the night before, it’s a late-night slot for what must be a very tired group of people. Regardless, they’re out bang on schedule and immediately whipping the entire crowd into a frenzy, with one of the biggest mosh pits Portugal has ever seen breaking out within seconds. The stage banter is pretty much non-existent, the focus instead on a tight, furious hour of music. Tracks from across the band’s back catalogue get an airing, but most impressive is the response to cuts from new album ‘Never Enough’, released a week ago but apparently already a fan favourite.
As bands like Turnstile get bigger they have to navigate a way to maintain the sense of intimate chaos on bigger stages with wider barriers between them and the audience. Early Turnstile shows had a constant stream of audience members climbing on stage and diving right back off, something that is obviously not possible with wider barriers, bigger crowds, and more stringent security. The trade-off for this is an unrelenting crowd energy, which is amplified by just how many people are in the seething mass of mosh pits, crowd-surfs, and dancing.
Primavera Porto takes the best of the festival’s Barcelona lineup, halves the ticket prices, and plonks it down in the middle of a city that is so nice that it’s worth visiting even when there isn’t a festival on. Spend the evening watching an eclectic lineup of incredible acts, and spend the day exploring Porto Tram Museum’s collection of 16 different trams* – what’s not to love?
*We suppose you could do something else instead of this part.
Leave a Reply