Reign in Spain
The Back To The Who 51 tour rolls into Spain to confront the future of festivals. By Pat Gilbert.
The Who Mad Cool Festival, Madrid
The Mad Cool Festival is set in a far-flung suburb of Spain’s sprawling, dusty capital, in a vast area encompassing La Caja Mágica – a complex featuring three open-air tennis stadia with space-age, retractable roofs. The blurb boasts this event is “beyond music”. Here, there are no stinky long-drop toilets, burger vans, mud or anything else that might make you feel you’re at an actual festival. Instead, its futuristic concept rather marvellously upholds the Douglas Adams axiom that “technology is something that doesn’t work yet”. A queue as long as the Brexit fall-out is forming at a booth designed to charge your fancy, micro-chipped wristband with enough wonga to buy a drink. But the machine has broken down. And you can’t use cash at the majority of the bars. It doesn’t matter. The ultra-modern Mad Cool can’t withstand the humanising effect of 50,000 souls desperate to dance, drink, pee and, inexplicably, queue after midnight to see Django Django and Editors perform in one of said high-tech tennis stadia. MOJO are lured here by the presence of The Who, sensibly performing on the huge, main open-air stage at 9.35pm, not long after the Madrid sun has decided to appear for a dramatic sunset, having spent the whole day hiding behind unseasonably persistent rain clouds. The prospective view of the band from the premium-viewing podium is really quite something, and nerves begin to tingle. Then a Spaniard in a hi-vis jacket bundles us out into the arena for apparently not having the right wristband (presumably one that actually gets you a drink). Mid-kerfuffle, The Who take the stage. This time last year, they were preparing for the extraordinary performance in front of 60,000 at Hyde Park, which, with Pete Townshend in particularly belligerent mood, seemed to mark an appropriately aggressive and emotional farewell to their British fans, capping as it did the valedictory The Who Hits 50! tour. Soon after, Roger Daltrey fell ill with viral meningitis, and one assumed it was curtains for the group: but, with the singer back to his chipper self (and tonight even doing funny Elvis impressions), the Back To The Who 51 package continues to roll. When Townshend – in woolly hat – declares “Madrid, we love you!” at the start of an 18-song greatest hits set with only the stirring, Pete-sung I’m One off Quadrophenia as a surprise, one is tempted to think they’ll be going through the motions; but their commitment to their art, even in this twilight Astroturfed utopia/dystopia, is unnervingly complete. With Zak Starkey a violent, brooding, abstract rhythm engine, and Townshend pulling off a high scissor-kick in Baba O’Riley and then crash-landing after – I kid you not – a spirited knee-slide on Won’t Get Fooled Again, there’s a genuine defiance in their septuagenarian, Shepherd’s Bush swagger. Even Daltrey, understandably less lairy with twirling microphone than in his salad days, makes up for it with a voice that shakes Mad Cool’s balmy summer atmosphere on Love Reign O’er Me’s biggest notes. A master class in rock, then, by a group that refuses to go quietly promises much for the future. You better, you bet.