Barcelona

27 & 28 April

All journeys need a destination, a high point around which all roads are to and from. For this one, the risk of peaking-too-early after three days is sky-high as I check into a conference hotel for two nights. This evening, two old pals are in town so we are going for dinner at Cal Pep, El Abuelito of the city’s tapas bars and inspiration for London’s superb Barrafina.

But this is not the highlight. Nor is the modish lunch at Cruix the next afternoon, starting at the distinctly Iberian hour of 15:30. For today is Thursday 27 April and tomorrow is the day that Bruce Springsteen and his E-Street circus come to town to play one of two concerts at the historic Passeig Olímpic stadium in Montjuic Park.

There is always a buzz about Barcelona but more so than usual today. Everyone at breakfast in the hotel seems to be here for the same reason. Faded tour T-shirts from decades long-since passed are stretched over thickening middles, evidence of piety and a lifelong devotion.

The TV has constant coverage of what is clearly a major cultural event for the city. We can’t work out why a dishevelled old man with a scruffy beard, wearing a baseball cap twenty years after he could have got away with it style-wise, is being interviewed. It turns out to be Steven Spielberg, in town for the concert with his wife along with mutual pals of the Springsteen’s, the Obama’s.

I’ve planned the trip around this event for a few spurious reasons.

An article from Bike magazine in the late 1970s described a journey to Barcelona through France to see the 24-Hour Bol D’Or race in Barcelona. To a 16-year-old with a £5 Honda SS50, watching motorbikes hare round Montjuic Park “eating sizzling hot meat drinking a good Rioja at three in the morning” was the most louche, rakish and enviable way of spending an evening imaginable and I badly wanted to be that person.

Later, Breganze’s Moto Laverda (or more specifically, Slater Brothers, the UK importer) named their equally rakish, race-derived 500 cc twin after the circuit. All the more desirable as it was parodically expensive, priced at a comedic level compared to the class-leading Honda 400/4 and even the other Italian stallions in the same segment.

In 2004, I chanced upon one for sale for about the same money as they went for in 1980. Despite having to scour the globe for parts and specialist engineering skills to keep it going and multiple breakdowns, it has now assumed heirloom status. My son - then 12 years old and now 32 has ridden it and decreed it can never be sold. So that’s that then: a Montjuic is for life.

In the late 1970s, I worked in the Record Department at Boots on Saturdays. It was a quaint period in British retail history when this particular company had concluded that easy-to-please British working people would like to buy their, dog-food, cameras, TVs, ’music centres’ and records from the same place as they collected their suppositories and other stuff they went to the ‘Chemist’ for. Different times…

It also meant I was able to listen to pretty much anything that took my fancy until told to play Mantovani or whatever the sponsored album was. So bit by bit, I absorbed pretty much all the Springsteen canon, at that time only four of five albums.

But it wasn’t until 1985 that I witnessed his messianic presence at the old Wembley stadium. Never mind the woeful acoustics, minimal view and ropy quality big screens, it was intoxicating and over the intervening forty-odd years, I’ve gone to numerous UK shows.

But as New Jersey’s second-favourite son, Tony Soprano observed in an early episode: “Things are trending downwards”. Now, with a combined age exceeding 500 years, this tour probably represents the last chance to see Springsteen and his E-Street Band.

So given all the boxes it ticked for me, and after fortifying ourselves at Barna Brew, a craft ale bar in the Sant Antoni area near the university, we are now climbing a steep path up Montjuic, through a rather beautiful Roman amphitheatre, in the velvet of an early Catalonian evening, along with 55,000 other disciples.

And what a show it was. Stadium concerts were never meant to be this good. The sound is as clear, rich and full as a glass of good Oloroso. Huge 4K screens portray each familiar face, lined and weathered by the decades as if carved out of black granite and lit by a visiting moon.

Amongst the crowd in the pricey front-of-stage section, there’s a surprising number of Gen-Zedders and Millennials. But most are greying, still living life to the full and share a single, collective thought: this band has been a constant our entire adult lives and we won't see the like of them again.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, veteran music critic Neil McCormick rated it one of the best concerts he’d ever seen with the proviso that every Bruce Springsteen show qualifies as one of the greatest anyone will ever see. He also picked up the understated edge to the event predicting “that this is reluctantly, defiantly, yet inevitably coming to an end”.

When it does, and the screen door in Thunder Road slams for a final time, let’s hope there’s a rock face somewhere in the Kittatinnny Valley or some other Jersey mountain range that this band - and the two that have already ‘left the stage’ - can be properly immortalised, Mount Rushmore style.