Partying with the Mediterranean multitudes

What would it mean to live our lives more publicly?

First, some quick housekeeping: my new book, MULTITUDES: How Crowds Made the Modern World, is out very soon — on Tuesday 22 October 2024. You can pre-order it now. And if you’re in London this month, please do come and see me speaking about riots, protests, carnivals, fascists, revolutionaries, moshing, policing, crushes, and crowd joy, rage and psychology. Ticket links below.

🟡 The Multitudes launch is at Conway Hall on Sun 20 October at 3pm. Tickets.

🟡 On Weds 30 October I will be in conversation with my brilliant friend Hettie O’Brien at Dalston’s Burley Fisher bookshop. Tickets.

🟡 On Thurs 31 October, I'm in conversation with the artist and dancer Adam Moore at The Whitechapel Gallery, talking about crowds, people and public space. Tickets.

Anyway, to business. And by business, I mean, I’ve just returned from a late-summer trip by train through France and then hiking through the Pyrenees to Catalunya, the latter part with the excellent

Huw Lemmey

, whose Substack you should read. It was an energising, thought-provoking trip, which had me asking such vexing world-historical questions as: “When did Britain’s public festivities start to lag behind those of southern Europe?”, “Have we ever partied as much as the Spanish?”, “Is it all the Reformation’s fault?”, and “How much fuet can I eat before it becomes a health problem?”

Turning a corner in the Barceloneta neighbourhood of Barcelona on a warm Sunday afternoon, I heard the delightful, distant echoes of a sound I’ve heard so many times before: live keyboards and guitars bouncing off residential walls, a covers band banging out 80s pop classics, competing with the lively hubbub of scores of conversations going on at once, laughter and the occasional squeal of delight. This was one micro-neighbourhood’s ‘Festa Major’, an annual, free community festival which takes place entirely outdoors, in public, usually in the summer, with a makeshift bar or three, dancing, singing, drinking, eating and socialising, music and other cabaret performances, costumed parades, traditional rituals like the Catalan castells (human towers), fun and games for the kids, treasure hunts and light-hearted sporting competitions — sometimes just for a weekend, but often for an entire week of days and nights. A festa major/fiesta mayor is an entirely self-organised community festival: there’s no barriers, no tickets, no cost to entry, no sponsorship, no profit motive, just a true devotion to collective joy for its own sake.

Now that, my friend, is a paella dish

In the midst of the crowd, an 80-something nana in a wheelchair danced with a girl of about 8, amidst a happy din of dancefloor singalongs (with particular enthusiasm, amusingly, to The Village People’s ‘In The Navy’ — Barceloneta is right next to the Med, and not far from the city’s port). Two young guys with well-tended beards snogged happily away next to them, friends greeted one another with ostentatious, arms-aloft glee, and the pensioner running the bar briefly enlisted me to help rearrange the tables — because I was the nearest person to hand; and because of course everyone mucks in, even pallid Anglos who are clearly tourists. I was flattered to be asked — to be involved. This, I thought — casting my mind back to a summer of expensive, heavily securitised, fenced off day festivals in London parks — is how it ought to be.

I’ve travelled to and across Spain a lot for journalistic reasons over the years, writing about ghost towns, mass graves, fascist monuments, communist utopias, radical housing activists, insurgent political movements and even high-end seafood. I’m not sure a single trip has passed without my encountering some festa, fiesta, feria or carnaval, frequently by accident. There are the ‘big ones’ — I’ve been part of the massed chaos of Semana Santa in Sevilla, and Carnaval in Cádiz (more on that in Multitudes) — but it’s the tiny, informal local affairs in towns and neighbourhoods that really have my heart. I’m thinking of the anarchist clowns from the CNT union running the carnaval bar in the small town of Pedrera, and the exuberant teenage metal band in El Puerto de Santa Maria covering Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’, while children did sumersaults and their bemused grandparents nursed their sherries. I remember well the festa majors in small towns in Catalunya from childhood holidays: in Púbol, and Cardedeu, and how baffled I was that a) all the local kids were allowed out to play unsupervised, indefinitely and b) just how LATE everything went. It’s not unusual to see under-10s and over-80s still out into the small hours of the morning.

The anarcho-syndicalist CNT running the carnaval bar in Pedrera in 2013

This reminder of how the other half of Europe live, and celebrate, happened to me in France as well this year. We were on a quiet, early-June break to the quaint town of Troyes; just some nice food, beautiful old buildings, a bike ride, we thought — but no! On Friday night we realised we had stumbled on Fête de la Musique, an annual, nationwide day of free live music, coordinated from the centre of the French state since 1982 — with the foundational rule that no partygoer pays to attend, and no musician is paid to play. Allegedly there has been a UK version, but I’ve literally never heard of it before. In Troyes, a town of 60,000 people, there were at least ten different performances going on simultaneously across the town centre; from substantial rock and techno main stages, with massive rigs and audiences in the hundreds, to a group of earnest teens rapping to 10 of their mates, and two older Lebanese guys sitting on chairs outside a restaurant, playing on their oud and tabla to passersby. Nowhere were there barriers, fences, security guards or ticketing infrastructure of any kind. The streets and squares were thrillingly full of life all night.

So, why can’t we do this here? Why don’t we do this? The weather? That can’t be all of it. In any case, northern France, and indeed parts of northern Spain, are barely any less wet than parts of Britain (trust a man who once had his notebook drenched beyond all legibility during a reporting trip to Oviedo in November). What if it is simply that the Spanish are “a festive people”, to use the casually racist line deployed in Seinfeld about Puerto Ricans? I don’t buy this essentialist nonsense — in any case, Britain can boast the most vibrant (paid-for!) music festival culture in the world. Our summer festivals are pretty much the only pillar of the economy still thriving, alongside financial services, landlordism, and exporting TV presenters to the US. And if you look back into British history before the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution — as I do in Multitudes, as we all should do, because it’s fascinating and inspiring stuff — you discover an incredibly rich, thrillingly anarchic, centuries-long history of hyperlocal festivities, pagan rites and rituals, Saint’s Days, revels, church ales and wakes, most of them long since buried under the grey blanket of Protestant reaction.

But the impulse to organise our own fun is still there. We’ve all got it in us, because everybody does — it is innately human to want to gather with friends, neighbours and strangers and have a little sing-song to the Village People, sip a €2 beer, and dance long into the night. In Britain, we’ve let the capitalist events economy capture the free, open, self-assembling crowd, cage it behind 10-foot metal fencing, and charge each of its atomised individual attendees £70 to get in and £7 for a pint. It doesn’t have to be that way.