At the first No Surrender Festival in Vilanova de Bellpuig, Spain, in 2017, Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender” was performed by 1,004 musicians and singers.
In 2018 at the same festival, the Boss’ “Badlands” was performed by even more people (1,083). And this past weekend, the festival attempted to break its own record for the most people performing a Springsteen song together by rocking out to “Glory Days” over and over on a soccer pitch in the village of 1,170.
Every year, Springsteen has been invited to join in the jam. And every year, he has not shown up.
This year’s invitation to the festival read: “Dear Bruce, We don’t want to quit you so much time and we just send you this letter for inform you that this year we don’t surrender again. Every year we live with the emotion of if you are going to appear.”
The ringleader of the NSF, 46-year-old restaurant owner Josep Maria Pons, told The Wall Street Journal he has spent more than $40,000 attempting to get the singer to visit.
“Please come here, Bruce Springsteen,” Pons’s wife, Helena Esteve, said on the day of the event. “It would be better for me if you came and my husband was finished with this.”
During this year’s attempt, performers sang as well as played guitars, basses, drums, keyboards, saxophones, trumpets and trombones. The WSJ did not have an exact attendance number so it is unclear if this year’s NSF broke the record for performers which was set last year.
A video documenting the more than eight hours of “Glory Days” is supposed to be released around Springsteen’s birthday in September.
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