A Night on the Town in Barcelona: The Best Places to See Live Music

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Spain can be an unusual location of curation for live music. The most prevalent trends are discotheques based around popular music (mostly American), hippie and rasta jam bands, or death metal. Anything else can be hard to come across unless you know where you’re looking. Even for a cosmopolitan contemporary cultural center like Barcelona, such places are pretty small, but there are indeed lesser-known pockets where similar musicians and friends gather.

Part of the reason why independent music isn’t flourishing in the city like one would think and why there aren’t a lot of live indie rock venues has to do with laws and police. Getting licenses is very difficult and expensive for small business owners already contending with the crisis. Because Barcelona is so thickly settled, noise complaints and violations become an issue, which can also end up being expensive. The difficulties associated with the live music scene have resulted in the closing of venues, and bands being forced to actually pay to play, which means that a lot of bands don’t ever end up playing live. There also aren’t ever any apartment shows for the same thickly settled reasons that cause venues problems.

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Mujeres, Mujeres, Mujeres: Putting Their Fists Down

Photo by Ivan Montero

Published on thebomberjacket.com.

Luchador Records is down the street from the MACBA, Barcelona’s contemporary art museum where you constantly have to dodge skaters who are making videos, doing tricks off of the entrance’s ramps, staircases and the ample open space of the white stone plaza. More often than not, they’re also smoking weed and drinking a few San Miguels. At the beginning of the record shop’s sparse street that only houses one other record store, a clothing outlet and a fruit stand, I stopped for just a minute to read a Spanish poem scrawled on the wall called, “Ways to Kill.”

I was going to interview Mujeres at the store the bassist co-owns and that is their secret lair of sorts. Upon entering the place I saw a bunch of records on the walls that I surprisingly recognized, which was a nice change for being in Spain, and it immediately reminded me of DIY music spaces I had come across in the US. There were zines, random art projects like boxes of rolling papers with poems written on each paper, cassette tapes of local bands, patches for the “Pizza Army” and even one floppy disk of what undoubtedly couldn’t have been more than one song. What was more, as the band led me to the back space, past the huge Japanese arcade game, where we would do the interview, they told me that they had shows there every once in a while.

Besides being a great bopping rock and roll band with wavey surf riffs and fuzzified garage intensity, they have the potential to be an influential force for the future of Barcelona’s DIY and “indie” music. They explained that there weren’t many bands like them in the city and it’s true that on any given night there aren’t a ton of places to go see music or even music to go see. If more groups pop up with a mentality like Mujeres, places like Luchador would be perfect nesting grounds for music collectives. Either way, the spot is a cool one to visit and Mujeres is a band not to miss live.

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