If anyone had a good time at Mad Cool last night, it was Robbie Williams. The Briton led a show with passion, sarcasm and talent that paralyzed the venue to the point that practically all of the 60,000 people who attended the first day of this 2023 edition yesterday opted for the main stage during their performance.
Let me entertain you was not just another song on the set list, but rather a declaration of intent that left the 90 minutes reserved by the organization short. Even more so considering that just entering, or leaving, the Villaverde musical enclave took more time from the respectable. Part of which even missed The Offspring’s download, the first of the highlights, on stage 2.
Something that did not matter to the Californian punk legends for whom the labels are just a collection of trading cards in a repertoire dotted with ska, grunge and even metal that twisted the arm of a blinding sun for those who had forgotten their glasses. Sun. Dexter Holland and co. They did not skimp on their return to Spain and, in addition to dazzling their fans, they caught up with a large part of the public that came to see them on their way to another stage to the rhythm of Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) or Self Esteem.
From there, it was time to choose. Machine Gun Kelly and The 1975. Sharp guitar rap or satirical pop rock. That was the question that the attendees asked themselves to decide between scenario 1 and 3.
At its end, and after 10:00 p.m., Sigur Rós did not disappoint either The Icelandic band, which in 2022 put an end to a 10-year drought in the capital, plowed melancholy to abyssal depths with an unmistakable staging and extreme sounds fruit of bending the strings of their guitars with bows more typical of violins or double basses.
At the same time, the explosive American Lizzo broke in with her bet on funk, pop and r
Her energetic performance charged the batteries for what everyone was waiting for, and only Rina Sawayama missed performing at the same time. We are talking about Robbie Williams, who was making his debut in the capital as the headliner of a festival.
Dressed completely in gold, with spiky gray hair and much thinner than in his last appearances, the Briton has come with a repertoire of greatest hits, has taken occasional mass baths on the dance floor and in that complicity has allied himself with the concurrency even by missing the start of “Monsoon”. “It’s just that I’ve had a very long covid!”, He has apologized to the laughter of the public.
“I only have two kinds of songs: ‘I’m a fucking amazing guy’ and ‘you’ve left me alone and devastated’,” he continued between his hilarious self-parody, which has led to the days of Take That (“When I was doing gay porn”, he joked), as his own songs like Come Undone or Rock Dj, versions like Don’t Look Back In Anger by Oasis, and a finale with the essential Angels and Feel have played.
The closure of the day around 2 in the morning (to lessen the inconvenience of the residents who surround the Ibedrola Music) has fallen on the one hand on the classic option of Franz Ferdinand and, on the other, on Lil Nas X.
Moving from the Caja Mágica (maximum capacity of 55,000 people) to Valdebebas (80,000) allowed the organization to multiply a festival that, with only two editions, had already shown its candidacy to become a key date in the Spanish musical summer. The move, this year, to the City of Music, is a declaration of intent to reign on the continent, although for this it will have to first solve the problems of access to the venue that, like a ghost, accompany Mad Cool every year.
One-hour queues in the sun at the entrance on foot, more than three kilometers of traffic jam on the M-45 near Getafe -the service road has been cut- to access by car, and public transport collapsed. Accessing the venue between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. was an odyssey for part of the 66,000 spectators who, based on the experience of previous years, feared that something similar could happen again at the exit. And they were not wrong.
The exit ramp chosen for the VTC, located a 15-minute walk away, collapsed due to the desperation of the travelers who canceled their trips over and over again, crossing their fingers to get once and for all a vehicle that would allow them to leave the Marconi industrial estate to reconcile the least three hours of sleep before facing the workday this Friday.
This Friday Sam Smith, Mumford And Sons, The Black Keys and Queens Of The Stone Age will be some of the main assets of the second day, which will be followed tomorrow by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Liam Gallagher and M.I.A., among others.
