This was the 8th edition and every year this festival grows more and more, this year the organization was expecting aproximately 25.000 people (which is the limited capacity), all the tickets sold out and the camping sites as well.
The Marés vivas Festival took place in the city of Gaia in a site called “Cabedelo” for the 3rd consecutive year (located on the other side of the Douro River) so it has a terrific view over the city of Porto. The place has a large number of facilities where you can buy beer, food, cigarettes, clothes, candies, etc. and it has two stages: one is for smaller concerts and after-parties, which leaves the main stage for the headliners.
Day 01
The night started with the beautiful and relaxing voice of Morcheeba; there was no delay at all but the place wasn’t full yet.
Morcheeba interacted with the audience during their performance asking them to make a big wave of hands and sing along. Daisy (vocals) asked if we liked her dress because she made it herself. One of the band members made a compliment to the location where the event was taking place. Some of the songs they played were “Otherwise”, “Even Though”, “Crimson”, “Blood like lemonade”, “Trigger hippy”, and “Beat of the Drum”.
Later on Ross Godfrey decided to share a “funny memory” (and I say funny just because he said it was) when he was a child and came to the Cabedelo beach with his father but almost got drown due to the bad weather in the sea.
By the end of the show they came back for an encore with songs such as I am the spring, over and Over, Be yourself and Rome.
People were more heated up when goldfrapp started to play; songs like Crystalline Green, You Never Know, Believer, Alive, Ride a White Horse, “Rocket” and “Shiny One” were in my opinion, the best songs.
GNR was the last band, and they began by making a reference to the poor performance of Portugal in the world cup and sang “Clube dos Encalhados” which means something like “The Stranded Club” the relation is of course the fact that we called ourselves “the navigators” but we ended up like a wrecked ship run ashore. Almost everyone knew and sang almost all the songs, you could see there was a strong connection between the band and the audience, the vocalist was always making jokes and he even made a faithful imitation of Mão Morta vocalist (another portuguese band). Their encore was pretty big, with four songs: Burro em pé, Sexta-feira, Mais Vale Nunca and Sangue Oculto.
Day 02
When we arrived we got in time to see David Fonseca,on this second day the place was more crowded than yesterday.the background of the stage was covered with big screens with all kinds of images and signs, it looked great with the lights, confettis, and visual effects; they also had a telephone booth on stage, so in the middle of one song David Fonseca entered the Telephone Booth and started singing inside like he was calling someone, he has a dynamic posture on stage.
He started with a remix of “I Want to break Free” from Queen and some other songs such as “Owner of her heart”, “Kiss me, oh Kiss me”, but the more awaited song was “Someone that cannot love” They also played a version of “The roof is on fire” and then continued with “Stop 4 a minute”. One of the best moments of their show was this cover of Cindy Lauper “Girls just wanna have fun” which was dedicated to all the women of the fest, David claimed that the ladies know better than men how to have fun, could it be true?
Well, I think Placebo needs no introduction; the place was full so it took me about half an hour to get near of the stage, it was almost physically impossible getting there, but after pushing and stepping over people I finally succeeded.
People went berzerk when they played “Bitter end” and among others songs such as “Every you, every me”, “Special needs”, “Breathe underwater”, “The never ending why” and they pleased us with a Nirvana cover of “All Apologies”. Brian Molko (Vocals) has an electric personality, he encouraged the audience during the show, by the end of the “Song to say Goodbye” he joked around a little bit by telling people not to leave otherwise we may broke his heart. They ended with an encore consisting of four songs, which were “Trigger Happy”, “Post Blue”, “Infra-red”, and “Taste in men”, what a great show.
When Peaches started to play the sound was really loud; Merril Beth (vocals) appeared first with a long furry coat covering all her body (you couldn’t even see her face) and then two dancers entered on stage as she took off the furry outfit; from now onwards she switched dresses approximately 6 times during the entire show. Merril has a very powerful presence, very theatrical, artistic (she was a music/drama teacher) and of course, flashy. But if we can make a comparison with Placebo in terms of crowd, i dare to say that the place looked a little bit emptier. With Peache’s one’s got more to say about the show and the performance of Merril Beth, she did everything there’s to do in a show: she made surfcrowd, she even asked to people put away their cellphones because she wanted to walk among the crowd: “Jesus walked on water, Peaches walk on you” she said.
It’s always amusing when artists takes advantages of the old rivalry between Lisbon and Porto she ended with a crowd of shirtless people shaking up their tshirts prooving how “hardcore” the city of Porto/Gaia was. From playing with a light saber, changing dresses, flashing panties, appearing covered in towels like she just got out of the shower, fake breasts (yes, plastic ones), Peaches truly demonstrated that anything could happen in their living acts; during the whole show you just waited for the next crazy thing that could emerge from the stage.
Day 03
This last day we arrived earlier and Nikolaj just started to play; their acoustic music was in tune with the beautiful sunset we had the opportunity to see as the vocalist reminded us that they do not have this kind of weather too often in Denmark. Nikolaj songs talks about love and romance “because that’s what life’s all about” the vocalist said; they have a very “peace and love” personality and successfully transpose it into their music.
It seems that this last 2 days were the fullest; this was the time for Editors to play and the public was already screaming for them, they started with “In this light and on this evening” with Tom Smith on the piano, followed by other tracks such as “Bones”, “Bullets”, “Blood”, and “Munich”. Everything seemed to go according to the plans when suddenly Tom stopped playing at the beginning of “Smokers outside the hospital door” leaving the stage with no further explanation; after a couple of minutes they came back and apologized saying that they had an electric shock, mainly in the piano so they couldn’t play three more other piano songs of the setlist so they ended the show a little bit earlier than expected.
Ben Harper & the Relentless was the last band of the night and the one closing this 8th edition of the festival. The band delighted us with drum, bass, and guitar solos. Ben sat down with the electric guitar on his lap and started playing like he was playing on a piano.
Ben Harper played for more than two hours! It was a wonderful show with a big repertoire full of old and new songs such as “Feel Love” “Diamonds on the inside”, “Shimmer and Shine”, “Burn one down”, “Better Way” “Amen Omen” and wonderful covers as well, Ben played Heartbreaker from Led Zeppelin, Billie Jeans from Michael Jackson and Redhouse from Jimi Hendrix. He also played “The power of the gospel” from the time when he played with The Innocent Crimminals.
