Relive the ‘Glory Days’ as video released of third Catalan Bruce Springsteen festival

The video of the third edition of the ‘No Surrender’ festival, held in a remote village in western Catalonia, has been released. 

More than 1,000 musicians and Bruce Springsteen fans (although these are basically synonymous - if you aren’t a Springsteen fan can you really call yourself a musician?) gathered to perform a rendition of one of his iconic singles, ‘Glory Days’, from 1985.

The tradition, which takes place in Vilanova de Bellpuig, near Lleida, is somewhat new in Catalonia, but growing. In 2017, hundreds of musicians gathered to play ‘No Surrender’, and continued with a performance of his earlier hit ‘Badlands’. 

This year the festival attracted unprecedented levels of international interest. Musicians came from Catalonia, Galicia, Mallorca, Madrid and many more regions in Spain, but the remote village also welcomed fans from Italy, England, and even as far as the USA, India and Australia.

Perhaps most notably, the videos published for 2017 and 2018 have 1.2 million and nearly 900,000 views respectively. 

Performers, who all wore matching blue T-shirts with pink writing, put together a brass band, drumming, keyboards and a predictably excessive number of guitarists. 

Rather astonishingly, such a clip is put together in a matter of hours - the bands rehearse from midday onwards, and in the early evening, the clip is recorded 10 times to put together the perfect sequence of closeup and drone images. 

The video will be played to the icon himself, and it certainly does him justice. The energy of the rendition, with 1,000+ musicians collectively bellowing the lyrics under the blazing sun, is able to capture the exuberant and effervescent style typical to Springsteen's stage performances.

With the Catalan festival’s growing popularity, as well as the recent success of the tribute film ‘Blinded by the Light’, long live the glory days.