The summer period has proven to be the most prolific time for live music with a multiplication of festivals and musical events that end up saturating the summer calendar. That is why the month of June has become a very fertile space for artists and programmers, who have found a place to bring the big stars closer to each other in the weeks leading up to the start of summer. These are the brightest that will perform between Donostia, Vitoria, Bilbao and Pamplona.
The Buenos Aires musician is more than an icon of Argentine rock. It has been three decades since he separated from Los Rodríguez, but it has been his solo career that has established him as a composer of great flights. ‘High dirt’ (1997), ‘Brutal honesty’ (1999) and ‘El cantante’ (2004) are the best examples of a discography that has reached 16 releases. Controversial and never without controversy, Calamaro will arrive at the Kursaal in San Sebastián on June 8 with his latest work ‘Dios los cria’, a collection of reversions of his hits, with which he has been touring throughout South America.
The singer-songwriter from Úbeda has returned to the stage three years after his spectacular fall in Madrid. After blowing out 74 candles, Sabina is now speeding up her tour of Latin America, before resuming concerts around the peninsula at the end of the month, with two dates at the BEC in Bilbao (June 23 and 25). A tour in which her eternal squire Pancho Varona will not be present. In that alliance of more than 40 years, the ubetense wrote with him more than a hundred of his classics. His controversial absence has stung his followers who, however, have celebrated the triumph of the documentary ‘Sentiendo lo mucho’ by Fernando León e Aranoa, which won a Goya Award for best original song.
‘La Iguana’ returns to Euskadi after packing the Kursaal in the last edition of Jazzaldia. This time it will be at Azkena Rock in Vitoria, on June 18, a festival that legends such as Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Van Morrison or The Who have already attended in recent editions. It will be his return to Menzibala 16 years later —after being announced (and suspended) in both 2020 and 2021—, in what promises to be a new date with the living history of punk.
Country on the shores of Lake Charles will travel with the godmother of the ‘American’ genre to Vitoria as the headliner of the Azkena Rock Festival. Williams, who already performed in the city in 2016, returns with her latest work ‘Good Souls Better Angels’, in whose songs she takes the opportunity to throw a dart at former President Trump. Recognized by industry figures such as Emmylou Harris, she is one of the best American female singers in history, as reflected in legendary albums such as ‘Car Wheels On A Gravel Road’.
Sixteen Grammys and more than 100 million records sold support the former The Police who have chosen the Biscayan capital to kick off the European leg of their ‘My Songs’ tour on June 1st. The Miribilla aims to be full to listen to the British bassist, who will tiptoe through his latest folk rock album ‘The Bridge’, to recover the classics of his immortal band and as a soloist, started in 1985 with the fantastic ‘The Dream of the Blue Turtles’.
Although lately he’s been making headlines for his reaction to Shakira’s last hint to Clara Chía and for the announcement of his new house-museum in Cádiz, the author of ‘Corazón partío’ will start the second part of his tour on June 3 in Navarra Pamplona Arena. Fifteen dates in Spain in addition to those completed in a first stage last summer, in which Sanz drew more than 300,000 spectators, thus becoming the most massive tour of the year.
Among the ‘musical legends’ of the next BBK Bilbao will be the rock, country, soul and R&B of the singer from North Carolina, already a regular on Basque stages. Before her performance in 2017 at the Convent Garden in San Sebastián, she already praised in this newspaper an audience that “is not passive or waits for the band to create the whole atmosphere. It is always a pleasure to be invited back to the Basque Country”. And she has been that way again on June 23rd, when she will look back on her much acclaimed album ‘Heavy Hearts Hard Fists’.
Precisely, the next day, the same Bilbao Arena will be the scene of another Nikki, in her case, coming from South Carolina. Lane is one of the current references of honky tonk and country rock that already dazzled in the last edition of the Huercasa de Riaza festival (Segovia). The ‘highway queen’ will arrive at the BBK Bilbao Music Legends with her new ‘Denim and Diamonds’ and bigger doses of guitar rock.
The fifth visit of the ‘hurricane’ to Donostia will be one of the great attractions of Gipuzkoa in 2023. And, in addition, it will do so twice on June 19 and 20. The legendary musician and singer-songwriter will present his thirty-ninth album ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ at a Kursaal that has already sold out its cheapest tickets and only offers seats for prices above 155 euros. The one from Duluth will celebrate the 60 years of his musical career in the city.
The guitarist of one of the most important bands of the 70s, Génesis, will return to the Kursaal (this time in the big room) on June 27. He will do it solo to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the stellar album ‘Fotxtrot’, which in 1972 was instrumental in placing Genesis at the forefront of British rock. On his own, Hackett has demonstrated his versatility over 30 albums.
The woman from Malaga will arrive in the Navarrese capital on June 2 with her eighth album ‘Pleasures and Sins’. Twelve songs in which she opens up to the most animal emotions such as learning, eating and sex, but also to guilt and fear. A show that shoots at intimacy from flamenco in which she claims to “run out of life.”