GOING OUT

The Festival Mil·lenni is an odd creature. First off, there’s the name. The event started in 1999 to welcome in the new millennium, so it all made perfect sense back then, but today... Perhaps the organisers are planning to hold it for the next 991 years. That wouldn’t be a surprise because they seem to like events that go on and on and on. This year’s festival lasts almost five months, which is presumably a good way to coordinate the diaries of the 32 acts taking part, but that’s a long run by anyone’s standards. And, apart from it clearly being a ‘music’ festival, it’s a difficult event to categorise; to say the line-up is eclectic feels like the last great understatement of 2009. The presence of Michael Bolton, playing his first-ever Barcelona concert (January 14th) and Greek-Egyptian icon Demis Roussos (February 4th) suggests that it is a retro easy-listening extravaganza. But the festival’s second concert, taking place this month on the 11th, features Russian Red, AKA the young, strikingly pretty Spanish singer Lourdes Hernández, who sings cool folk pop in English with a memorable (and unaccented) Cyndi Lauper-esque voice.