Hi I'm from... Barcelona!!! A lot of singer-songwriters NEVER PLAY in Spain... because they are not that popular due to LANGUAGE PROBLEM!!! People in Spain are pretty crap at languages, especially English, so no one understand the lyrics at all
And seriously, that's a big issue, especially for singers whose lyrics are a "key" issue. If you look at the Spanish charts, it's mostly Spanish artists or really famous International artists ala U2... and that's why most artists skip Spain...
It's the same for instance with Tori Amos, she's played thousands of gigs in Europe but never ever in Spain. And on her last tout she did like 6 shows in Italy but none in Spain. I really think it's a language problem...
by the way, in the San Francisco bootleg I got, Damien tells the "Barcelona story", after someone in the audience asks him to. He starts mentioning that Barcelona is in a part of Spain called Catalonia, which is very different from the rest, where they speak a language called Catalan and they consider themselves not-Spanish (which is 100% true by the way, so Damo is well-informed). Then he says that the city is very cool, chill out and that people are very relaxed, people like him with smelly clothes and not taking showers
He also says he met very interesting people there. He says the food is good, the weather nice, almost no rain, by the sea...He ends saying it's quite similar to San Francisco!!