Don’t stop the music

I re­cently went with a friend to talk to the owner of a music café in Barcelona about whether we could play there so that our friends and fam­ily could come along and enjoy some live music per­formed by their near­est and dear­est. You see, in the mid­dle of lock­down, this friend, who has his own band, and I de­cided to host a live music event for friends and fam­ily to al­le­vi­ate the bore­dom that months of con­fine­ment had in­flicted upon us. We found a bar in L’Eix­am­ple that was happy to let us play from lunchtime until early evening one Sat­ur­day (every­one had to be locked away at home by sun­down at the time), and with a much re­duced ca­pac­ity of some 30 peo­ple we pro­ceeded to have our­selves a live gig, with guests – my friend’s off­spring and off­spring of other friends – in­vited to play some of their music as well. It was a great suc­cess, mainly due to my hearty ren­di­tions of some Rod Stew­art clas­sics. The last part of that sen­tence was a joke – but it was a suc­cess, and we are look­ing to re­peat it now that life is edg­ing back to some kind of nor­mal­ity.

Hav­ing played live music in Barcelona spo­rad­i­cally over the years, I have al­ways been aware of the ten­sion be­tween bar man­agers/own­ers and local res­i­dents, and the con­stant threat of po­lice in­volve­ment and fines should the lat­ter have any griev­ances about noise lev­els. One story I heard re­cently in­volved a fam­ily com­plain­ing of live music being played in a bar at 9 pm on a Fri­day night be­cause the son was un­able to do his home­work. I pray it isn’t true. I would add here that, since I live above a bar my­self and on cer­tain nights hear every word peo­ple are say­ing out on the street until deep into the early hours, I do em­pathise with local res­i­dents who do not want to be both­ered by noise at unso­cia­ble hours.

How­ever, from what the owner of the music bar told us on our re­cent visit, the threat of fines for deci­bel lev­els is not the only issue they face when try­ing to host live music events, as she was re­cently fined for hav­ing mu­si­cians play­ing in her bar with­out a con­tract, all mu­si­cians sup­pos­edly being re­quired ei­ther to be self-em­ployed and pre­sent an in­voice for their per­for­mance, or on a con­tract with the bar. For small music venues like hers, this makes no eco­nomic sense what­so­ever, and she had sim­ply col­lected money from cus­tomers to pass on to the mu­si­cians for their time and ef­fort.

Any­way, to cut a very long story short, in con­trast with other major cities I’ve lived in, where local bands are en­cour­aged to play and paid to do so, and where the live music scene has al­ways blos­somed be­cause of that, it seems that in Barcelona op­por­tu­ni­ties for small and up­com­ing bands and mu­si­cians to play in live music venues are sadly few and far be­tween due to the var­i­ous threats of legal ac­tion hang­ing over the heads of any­one crazy enough to want to host it.