Sworn in

Last month the Barcelo­nan night club Bikini re­ceived a visit from Frank Turner, who is usu­ally de­scribed in his na­tive UK as a folk singer, though his music is about as close to folk as the oeu­vre of Chuck Palah­niuk is to that of Beat­rix Pot­ter. He also swears like a tipsy trooper (“Let's hear it for David fuck­ing Bowie!”) which might seem a bit of an im­pos­ture given that he comes from what sounds like a re­fined back­ground (his fa­ther is a City in­vest­ment banker and Turner him­self went to Eton). A back­ground he must have aban­doned as soon as he came of age, given that his songs sound like a cross be­tween CRASS and Billy Bragg; laced with au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal hon­esty, they deal in part with his once heavy drink­ing, his wob­bly per­son­al­ity ('un­com­fort­able me'), his youth­ful an­ar­chism and failed love af­fairs, and their lyrics are bet­ter than good. One tiny sam­ple: 'I'm sick and tired of peo­ple who are liv­ing on the B-list/They're wait­ing to be fa­mous and they're won­der­ing why they do this/And I know I'm not the one who's ha­bit­u­ally op­ti­mistic/But I'm the one who's got the mi­cro­phone here so just re­mem­ber this/Life is about love, last min­utes and lost evenings/About fire in our bel­lies and furtive lit­tle feel­ings'. All this de­liv­ered with an en­ergy that's like being slapped in the face with an elec­tric eel. Now, I'd been lis­ten­ing to him for over a year so knew more or less what I was in for when he ran onto the Bikini's stage, but my jaw dropped when after the first two open­ers he ad­dressed his au­di­ence in per­fect Cata­lan and then, read­ing from a sheet of paper, sang a short im­pro­vised song in that same lan­guage. Only about half the au­di­ence were from here (the rest were mainly British and Amer­i­can) but they cheered Turner's ges­ture with the same un­mis­tak­able en­thu­si­asm that the rest of the au­di­ences on his Eu­ro­pean tour will doubt­less cheer his surely in­evitable greet­ings in Dutch, Dan­ish, Czech, Pol­ish and so on. In other words, the re­ac­tion of the Cata­lans in the Bikini - who weren't wav­ing any flags and al­most cer­tainly didn't all think alike po­lit­i­cally - was, quite sim­ply, nor­mal. No­body can know for sure ex­actly where the mas­sive pro-indy demon­stra­tions of the last four years and the cur­rent pro-indy ma­jor­ity in the Cata­lan par­lia­ment will take us, but they have at least achieved one thing: we are def­i­nitely on the map and so we can as good as take our­selves for granted, which is a con­sid­er­able re­lief after hav­ing been de­lib­er­ately kept hid­den for so very, very long. So thank-you, Frank Turner. On your next visit, here's hop­ing you'll pack the Palau Sant Jordi.