Event Profile

Coachella Details...

Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, Indio, California, USA

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival (commonly known as Coachella, Coachellafest, or Coachella Festival) is an annual three-day music and arts festival, founded by Paul Tollett, organized by Goldenvoice (a subsidiary of AEG Live), and held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California in the Inland Empire's Coachella Valley. The event features many music genres, including rock, indie, hip hop, and electronic music, as well as sculpture. Across the grounds, several stages continuously host live music. The main stages are: Coachella Stage, Outdoor Theatre, Gobi Tent, Mojave Tent, and the Sahara Tent (2006 and 2011 also featured the addition of a smaller Oasis Dome and 2013 featured a new Yuma stage) 

Coachella Review...

To attend Coachella as someone more accustomed to the mud-’n’-cider of UK festivals such as Glastonbury is to experience a substantial culture shock. Held within the grounds of an exclusive polo club in the Californian desert city of Indio (where the 80,000 people who attend the festival double the population), the vibe was what the uninitiated might refer to as “spring break”: topless hunks and bikinied girls strolled over rare verdant ground surrounded by palm trees, sipping lattes behind Ray Ban shades in the sauna-like heat. Drinking was restricted to fenced-off zones; all around were toned torsos that revealed lager’s less-than-important social role.

Rarely has a festival been so disciplined in terms of stage times. When soul man Cee Lo Green — he of the wildly popular F-You song — went a few seconds over his allotted time, the plug was pulled. Lauryn Hill, however, managed to beat her curfew by a few minutes, after she and her groove-assured band distracted the organisers with a fast-paced set that took in Bob Marley, and revisited her 1998 album The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill.

California’s very own sons Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti stood starkly against the sunny commercialism of the festival: Pink, a hugely influential alternative star, appeared frazzled and knotted-haired, in front of a band that played lo-fi jams packed with thrillingly weird melodies. When some of the crowd did not warm to it, the singer sulked at their antipathy, storming off the stage more than once. At one point he remarked, “I know you hate me,” before coming back to scowl at his band like California’s last god of unhinged rock, Captain Beefheart.

It was the UK hopefuls who were the biggest successes in terms of popularity. Magnetic Man, a trio born out of the London-based dubstep radio station Rinse FM, rode the wave of the bass-heavy genre’s newfound popularity on the US club scene.

One of the weekend’s biggest draws came all the way from Northern Ireland. Thanks to a punishing tour schedule and a repertoire of frenetic and catchy songs, Two Door Cinema Club’s debut album Tourist History has become one of the biggest-selling band debuts of recent times, going gold in the UK. Judging by the intensity of the crowd’s surge to see them here, they look like they might well make light work of the tricky leap across the Atlantic.