The Coachella experience: California heat and millennial cool
Childish Gambino leads the global pop survey for the lucky – and wealthy – patrons at the US’s premier music festival
At Glastonbury, you pray for the ground to dry out; at Coachella, tractors spray the desert floor with water to damp it down. It’s one of the many moments of weirdness at America’s premier music festival, set on the lush grass of a polo field in a baking California desert – the kind of thing that resource-scarce future generations will shake their fists at.
The urinals are porcelain and the mozzarella is buffalo. The ethnically diverse, homogenously young crowd is exceedingly polite, beautiful and sober; everywhere you turn, someone is doing a performatively #blessed laugh for Instagram, though the vanity is a lot more honest and charming than you might think. The 1975 perform with a glowing rectangle behind them – a totemic image for this portrait-format generation – and is gently, fondly satiric: frontman Matt Healy is clearly as beholden to ego as much as anyone here.