Coastal Fever
Last time we went to Porto, it rained for a week. On touching down, it's drizzling and it seems like history is repeating itself as we wander round the streets of Matosinhos admiring the art and eating veggie food at Ginger. Last time I was here there was one vegetarian cafe, which was more of an anarchist drop-in centre that also did food, now there are three just in Matos.
We are staying behind the sealife centre in a tiny bungalow (or casa de praia as I prefer) opposite the Castle of Cheese, a fort you can visit for the bargain price of 40p and which looks nothing like cheese, unless you'd forgotten about something in the fridge for a long time. A group of oldsters pulls up in a minbus outside the sealife centre, which has disappeared by the time we get back - do penguins feed on pensioners?
*
Thursday is bright and hot and we wander the back streets of Matosinhos, which is all fish restaurants and heavily tiled buildings. There is a market selling cheese, tripas (not tripe, but filled biscuits), waffles, weird dolls. There is an impressive church, called Bom Jesus because all churches are called that in Portugal. Matos is trying to be a separate place with its own street signage (and explanations of who they're named for - some of them (the Portuguese equivalent of conquistadors) probably need to be cancelled). There's also a photo booth where you can take pics of yourself and local scenes and we are forced into it by a tiny, voluble Portuguese man. I'd forgotten how small the Portuguese are - I loom over them like a great Dane. We find a) a veggie restaurant on a tree lined avenida and b) a craft beer place, which doesn't open til 4 so we're standing outside, noses pressed against the glass like an English tourist in Spain waiting for a restaurant to commence the evening service. I drink 2 halves and then have a headache for the rest of the weekend, precluding any more drinking, which is - as Larkin said - not the place's fault, but my middle aged hormones, or lack thereof.
The festival is a lot smaller than Primavera Barcelona and it has also grass! Free stuff to claim! Wooded bits! Beanbags to sit on and let Stella Donnolly's music waft over. The first band we watch properly is the Unbreakable Kimmy Gordon, whose music I'm not that into but she's a performer and a half. The woman is almost 70 but she looks 45 and stomps around the stage like someone even younger than that in her silver boots and shades. Quelle senhora.
Later we watch Nick Cave. I have never really been into the wailing goth singing about murdering women, but when he strides onto the stage to the gospel-soul sounds of Get Ready For Love, I am smitten, even more so with I Need You, a song about a woman leaving him, but I wonder if it's about his son who died. His intonation: just breathe, just breathe just breathe just breathe just breathe could be about someone trying to get through grief or it could be someone willing someone else to live. We wander off to take a look at Black Midi and then wander back again and Nick is doing Ship Song, a big old romantic ballad that I do love.
*
It's Portugal Day so everyone is on the beach and there are helicopters and assorted planes flying over. I'm not sure Portugal has ever been involved in a war of the air, but so be it. Having gone north yesterday we go south today to Foz, the Broadstairs to Matos's Ramsgate and look at the Atlantic bashing itself against the beach. None of the locals, apart from a few hardy surfers, are in the sea. The warning flags fly perpetually red. The seafront is lovely though: a lighthouse, ice cream cone streetlamps, vanilla ice coloured promenade architecture, a cafe called Tavi, where the food is only OK but we sit just inside near the balcony, out of the wind but with a lovely seaview. It's great when we leave the holiday complex in the morning and (as well as the main road) the first thing you see is the sea.
There is an obelisk amongst the rocks, potentially a monument to shipwrecked sailors and a sign showing the spot where some pagan knights converted to Christianity after witnessing a miracle. These old timey knights and barons and whatnot seemed very easily converted, it almost seems like they wanted to go with the prevailing orthodoxy and just waited for a convenient coincidence to come along.
Festival fashion: Out - Four things t-shirts, plastic daisy crowns, In - ironic slogan t-shirts ("Record collecting ruined my life" "Tuning is not a crime"), fascinators made from actual flowers made by onsite florists. In - smoking, everyone is at it, even in the middle of a crowded front row. In - twenty-something Beanie Feldman lookalikes in square shorts. In - ugly shaved at the side haircuts which then fall to the collar like a de-gelled 1983 Howard Jones. I notice that old people wear band t-shirts and young people dress to impress. I also notice a kid without ear defenders and wonder who I should report his parents to.
We lie on the grass letting Slowdive wash over us like the sea, waving at the drone flying over. Then Beach Bunny, tuneful if unoriginal indiepop, then Rena Sawayama, a popstrel with bits nicked from Ariane Grande and Beyonce's careers and lyrics about being a boss, slaying, crushing it, loving yourself and other Millennial propaganda (being a slacker Gen X is a lot easier).
Rolling Blackouts run onstage enthusiastically. Aren't indie types supposed to mooch on looking sheepish? It makes sense when I realise that they're Australian and by local by-law gave their formative years to the Go Betweens and as such they now bleed Forster and piss McLennan. Two of them look like they work in a garage and I strongly feel that one of the guitarists goes surfing, so there's only the lead singer who looks like he doesn't believe the millennium ever happened (i.e. like an indie). They make a lovely pop racket and finish with their best song (as all the best bands do) and people mosh. I'm not sure anyone ever moshed to the Go Betweens.
*
Spend the morning on the beach trying to paddle but it's too cold.
At the festival, we watch Dry Cleaning, nonchalant goths with a penchant for autofiction lyrics and looking (the lead singer at leat) like a character in a Shirley Jackson novella. Then Khruangbin whom we "watch" from behind the bleachers on a small hillock. They do a megamix medley of everything from Abba to Talking Heads. Then Dinosaur Jnr, who are more like Dinosaur Snr nowadays. Their luggage ended up in Valencia so they are borrowing instruments. I worry about the guitars getting back to their rightful owners - I hope someone's put stickers on things. They end with Freak Scene and then Just Like Heaven, which sounds...heavenly in the early evening air. One of the cleaners outside the toilets starts dancing and air-guitarring along with the music.
Last of the night is Little Simz, who with supreme (and deserved) confidence plays her hit first. She has a live band, rather than a backing track and is a massively charismatic performer: even though I only know two songs I'm quite bowled over.
We can hear the Grimes DJ set as we walk along the beachfront home and long after we've fallen asleep. DJ sets seem like a bit of a rip off. I mean, if you went to see Ian McKellen talk about his life and career and instead he just played his favourite Brahms concerto, you'd be a bit miffed, no?
*
For the first time, we're not woken up by bands soundchecking at 9 a.m. There are bands I'd've like to have seen - Gorillaz, Tame Impala, Pavement, but all of them were on after the witching hour and I was exhausted each day by 11.30 p.m. After midnight, I start to turn into an abobora.
We get the hot tram into Central Porto and walk down the steep hill from the train station to the riverfront. I remember this road from 2012 when it was dark and lonely, now lined by cafes, brunch places, coffee shops, tourists as far as the eye can see. The buildings no longer look like they're about to fall into the Douro. I think EU money has been here. What idiots we are. We have an iced coffee and pastel de nata in a tiny cafe half way up a hill, then venture across the bridge to the rive gauche then back again to meet the others and have another (we're on us holidays) nata at a cafe that specialises in them.
There is even a nata menu - pastel de nata and coffee, pastel de nata and port, pastel de nata and orange mocha frappuccino. We get a lovely wooden boat down the river, then up the river to see all 5 bridges and get a bit of a river breeze, then huff up the hill to a stretch of bars in the Miragaia area, which aren't that amazing but are cheap and have a westerly viewpoint so you can sit and watch the sunset with your Super Bock. We eschew this however for food, a little place found serendipitously which does a veggie set menu of bread and olives and cheese and salad and tart and with a glass of wine from the vineyard that the restaurant owns.
Walk back down the hill, clinging to the side of the wall, amusing an old lady taking the evening air. We get the bus back, which is like a London bus in reverse: double decker but you get on the wrong side, the stairs are on the other side, and it's blue. Oh and everyone wears a mask. It's made for Portuguese height, I have to dip my head as I walk along the top deck. It goes along the riverfront then makes a right turn where the river meets the sea at Foz. If only there were a river taxi/bus from central Porto to Foz, that would be amazing.
Its nice to be back in Matos with its wide streets, flat roads and the cooling ocean breeze.
*
We go for second breakfast a.k.a Brunch at Picaba Natural cafe, a beachfront caff where I order a salad and get a toastie and an unexplained espresso, which I drink anyway. We go take a look at the park where the festival took place - the festival is still being taken down, the skeletons of the stages are still there (earlier, we saw chairs from the festival being returned to the seafront cafes) and will be for the next 6 days but the rest of the park is a shady delight, with a pine wood, very free range chickens and solitude until we come across several large schoolgroups.
Ditto when we go to Serralves - a tour of teenagers is being show around Mark Bradford's Pollock-esque work which is all about gay identity, systematic racism and the AIDS epidemic (apparently). Maybe Monday is school trip day? There is also Ana Jotta's exhibition of frightening masks that, as you approach, start talking to you in Portuguese-accented French. Creepy. Serralves is an open air sculpture park with 3 additional galleries/museums: as well as the cinema museum, the afore-mentioned Bradford/Jotta exhbitions, there is also a Miro exhibition in the Casa Rosa, an art deco ex-house. I'd've loved to know more about the house and its former occupants but the 1930s was a bit of an uncomfortable time for Portugal, perhaps they prefer to gloss over it.
We came here before but in the rain so didn't get past the first few installations. This time we get to the farm at the bottom of the park and see some goats, although not the wine press.
We get the bus back into Miragaia, cunningly cutting off most of the hill and are queuing outside Farinha (Porto's "third best restaurant") ten minutes before it opens. Twenty minutes after it's opened and we are seated outside (next to some chatty baby- boomer Americans about to cycle to Lisbon) it's full and the waitress spends the rest of the night taking names for a list. The owner or manager sets up an impromptu bar at the wall next to the church, ferrying aperol sprtizes to waiting customers. I have a giant salad (and a smaller pistachio creme brulee, which is bruleed at the table for us) - it's nice to get some vegetables down my gullet as the festival food was mainly chips or the world's worst noodles, something Camden Town would be ashamed to sell back in 1992.
Back in Matos, we watch the egg yoke sunset melt over the castle of cheese.
We are staying behind the sealife centre in a tiny bungalow (or casa de praia as I prefer) opposite the Castle of Cheese, a fort you can visit for the bargain price of 40p and which looks nothing like cheese, unless you'd forgotten about something in the fridge for a long time. A group of oldsters pulls up in a minbus outside the sealife centre, which has disappeared by the time we get back - do penguins feed on pensioners?
*
Thursday is bright and hot and we wander the back streets of Matosinhos, which is all fish restaurants and heavily tiled buildings. There is a market selling cheese, tripas (not tripe, but filled biscuits), waffles, weird dolls. There is an impressive church, called Bom Jesus because all churches are called that in Portugal. Matos is trying to be a separate place with its own street signage (and explanations of who they're named for - some of them (the Portuguese equivalent of conquistadors) probably need to be cancelled). There's also a photo booth where you can take pics of yourself and local scenes and we are forced into it by a tiny, voluble Portuguese man. I'd forgotten how small the Portuguese are - I loom over them like a great Dane. We find a) a veggie restaurant on a tree lined avenida and b) a craft beer place, which doesn't open til 4 so we're standing outside, noses pressed against the glass like an English tourist in Spain waiting for a restaurant to commence the evening service. I drink 2 halves and then have a headache for the rest of the weekend, precluding any more drinking, which is - as Larkin said - not the place's fault, but my middle aged hormones, or lack thereof.
The festival is a lot smaller than Primavera Barcelona and it has also grass! Free stuff to claim! Wooded bits! Beanbags to sit on and let Stella Donnolly's music waft over. The first band we watch properly is the Unbreakable Kimmy Gordon, whose music I'm not that into but she's a performer and a half. The woman is almost 70 but she looks 45 and stomps around the stage like someone even younger than that in her silver boots and shades. Quelle senhora.
Later we watch Nick Cave. I have never really been into the wailing goth singing about murdering women, but when he strides onto the stage to the gospel-soul sounds of Get Ready For Love, I am smitten, even more so with I Need You, a song about a woman leaving him, but I wonder if it's about his son who died. His intonation: just breathe, just breathe just breathe just breathe just breathe could be about someone trying to get through grief or it could be someone willing someone else to live. We wander off to take a look at Black Midi and then wander back again and Nick is doing Ship Song, a big old romantic ballad that I do love.
*
It's Portugal Day so everyone is on the beach and there are helicopters and assorted planes flying over. I'm not sure Portugal has ever been involved in a war of the air, but so be it. Having gone north yesterday we go south today to Foz, the Broadstairs to Matos's Ramsgate and look at the Atlantic bashing itself against the beach. None of the locals, apart from a few hardy surfers, are in the sea. The warning flags fly perpetually red. The seafront is lovely though: a lighthouse, ice cream cone streetlamps, vanilla ice coloured promenade architecture, a cafe called Tavi, where the food is only OK but we sit just inside near the balcony, out of the wind but with a lovely seaview. It's great when we leave the holiday complex in the morning and (as well as the main road) the first thing you see is the sea.
There is an obelisk amongst the rocks, potentially a monument to shipwrecked sailors and a sign showing the spot where some pagan knights converted to Christianity after witnessing a miracle. These old timey knights and barons and whatnot seemed very easily converted, it almost seems like they wanted to go with the prevailing orthodoxy and just waited for a convenient coincidence to come along.
Festival fashion: Out - Four things t-shirts, plastic daisy crowns, In - ironic slogan t-shirts ("Record collecting ruined my life" "Tuning is not a crime"), fascinators made from actual flowers made by onsite florists. In - smoking, everyone is at it, even in the middle of a crowded front row. In - twenty-something Beanie Feldman lookalikes in square shorts. In - ugly shaved at the side haircuts which then fall to the collar like a de-gelled 1983 Howard Jones. I notice that old people wear band t-shirts and young people dress to impress. I also notice a kid without ear defenders and wonder who I should report his parents to.
We lie on the grass letting Slowdive wash over us like the sea, waving at the drone flying over. Then Beach Bunny, tuneful if unoriginal indiepop, then Rena Sawayama, a popstrel with bits nicked from Ariane Grande and Beyonce's careers and lyrics about being a boss, slaying, crushing it, loving yourself and other Millennial propaganda (being a slacker Gen X is a lot easier).
Rolling Blackouts run onstage enthusiastically. Aren't indie types supposed to mooch on looking sheepish? It makes sense when I realise that they're Australian and by local by-law gave their formative years to the Go Betweens and as such they now bleed Forster and piss McLennan. Two of them look like they work in a garage and I strongly feel that one of the guitarists goes surfing, so there's only the lead singer who looks like he doesn't believe the millennium ever happened (i.e. like an indie). They make a lovely pop racket and finish with their best song (as all the best bands do) and people mosh. I'm not sure anyone ever moshed to the Go Betweens.
*
Spend the morning on the beach trying to paddle but it's too cold.
At the festival, we watch Dry Cleaning, nonchalant goths with a penchant for autofiction lyrics and looking (the lead singer at leat) like a character in a Shirley Jackson novella. Then Khruangbin whom we "watch" from behind the bleachers on a small hillock. They do a megamix medley of everything from Abba to Talking Heads. Then Dinosaur Jnr, who are more like Dinosaur Snr nowadays. Their luggage ended up in Valencia so they are borrowing instruments. I worry about the guitars getting back to their rightful owners - I hope someone's put stickers on things. They end with Freak Scene and then Just Like Heaven, which sounds...heavenly in the early evening air. One of the cleaners outside the toilets starts dancing and air-guitarring along with the music.
Last of the night is Little Simz, who with supreme (and deserved) confidence plays her hit first. She has a live band, rather than a backing track and is a massively charismatic performer: even though I only know two songs I'm quite bowled over.
We can hear the Grimes DJ set as we walk along the beachfront home and long after we've fallen asleep. DJ sets seem like a bit of a rip off. I mean, if you went to see Ian McKellen talk about his life and career and instead he just played his favourite Brahms concerto, you'd be a bit miffed, no?
*
For the first time, we're not woken up by bands soundchecking at 9 a.m. There are bands I'd've like to have seen - Gorillaz, Tame Impala, Pavement, but all of them were on after the witching hour and I was exhausted each day by 11.30 p.m. After midnight, I start to turn into an abobora.
We get the hot tram into Central Porto and walk down the steep hill from the train station to the riverfront. I remember this road from 2012 when it was dark and lonely, now lined by cafes, brunch places, coffee shops, tourists as far as the eye can see. The buildings no longer look like they're about to fall into the Douro. I think EU money has been here. What idiots we are. We have an iced coffee and pastel de nata in a tiny cafe half way up a hill, then venture across the bridge to the rive gauche then back again to meet the others and have another (we're on us holidays) nata at a cafe that specialises in them.
There is even a nata menu - pastel de nata and coffee, pastel de nata and port, pastel de nata and orange mocha frappuccino. We get a lovely wooden boat down the river, then up the river to see all 5 bridges and get a bit of a river breeze, then huff up the hill to a stretch of bars in the Miragaia area, which aren't that amazing but are cheap and have a westerly viewpoint so you can sit and watch the sunset with your Super Bock. We eschew this however for food, a little place found serendipitously which does a veggie set menu of bread and olives and cheese and salad and tart and with a glass of wine from the vineyard that the restaurant owns.
Walk back down the hill, clinging to the side of the wall, amusing an old lady taking the evening air. We get the bus back, which is like a London bus in reverse: double decker but you get on the wrong side, the stairs are on the other side, and it's blue. Oh and everyone wears a mask. It's made for Portuguese height, I have to dip my head as I walk along the top deck. It goes along the riverfront then makes a right turn where the river meets the sea at Foz. If only there were a river taxi/bus from central Porto to Foz, that would be amazing.
Its nice to be back in Matos with its wide streets, flat roads and the cooling ocean breeze.
*
We go for second breakfast a.k.a Brunch at Picaba Natural cafe, a beachfront caff where I order a salad and get a toastie and an unexplained espresso, which I drink anyway. We go take a look at the park where the festival took place - the festival is still being taken down, the skeletons of the stages are still there (earlier, we saw chairs from the festival being returned to the seafront cafes) and will be for the next 6 days but the rest of the park is a shady delight, with a pine wood, very free range chickens and solitude until we come across several large schoolgroups.
Ditto when we go to Serralves - a tour of teenagers is being show around Mark Bradford's Pollock-esque work which is all about gay identity, systematic racism and the AIDS epidemic (apparently). Maybe Monday is school trip day? There is also Ana Jotta's exhibition of frightening masks that, as you approach, start talking to you in Portuguese-accented French. Creepy. Serralves is an open air sculpture park with 3 additional galleries/museums: as well as the cinema museum, the afore-mentioned Bradford/Jotta exhbitions, there is also a Miro exhibition in the Casa Rosa, an art deco ex-house. I'd've loved to know more about the house and its former occupants but the 1930s was a bit of an uncomfortable time for Portugal, perhaps they prefer to gloss over it.
We came here before but in the rain so didn't get past the first few installations. This time we get to the farm at the bottom of the park and see some goats, although not the wine press.
We get the bus back into Miragaia, cunningly cutting off most of the hill and are queuing outside Farinha (Porto's "third best restaurant") ten minutes before it opens. Twenty minutes after it's opened and we are seated outside (next to some chatty baby- boomer Americans about to cycle to Lisbon) it's full and the waitress spends the rest of the night taking names for a list. The owner or manager sets up an impromptu bar at the wall next to the church, ferrying aperol sprtizes to waiting customers. I have a giant salad (and a smaller pistachio creme brulee, which is bruleed at the table for us) - it's nice to get some vegetables down my gullet as the festival food was mainly chips or the world's worst noodles, something Camden Town would be ashamed to sell back in 1992.
Back in Matos, we watch the egg yoke sunset melt over the castle of cheese.