Coachella

So I'm back from Coachella - a two day music festival in the desert near Palm Springs. Think of it as the Californian Glastonbury but with sunburnt shoulders in place of muddy trousers.  Madonna, Daft Punk, Massive Attack, Kanye West and a hundred other bands sweating blood for 80,000 pilgrims.  An intriguing mixture of LA plastic people, goths, frat-boys and famine-tourists.  And it was frickin' hot.  Hot, hot, hot.  My memory has melted it was so hot.

Let's get my completely objective music review out of the way first.

Sunny Oasis:  Daft Punk, The Go Team, that Rabbi rasta bloke for his human beatboxing,  Kanye West doing A-ha, Phoenix

(and yes those brilliant videos are mine)

Head In The Sand:  The Scissor Sisters and the absurdly pompous rock-headliners 'Tool' (who, thank rock, never seem to have made it to Blighty).  Cocks, the lot of them.

Right.  What else? 

Well mostly I remember being very, very hot and very, very thirsty.  That's deserts for you.  But while Mother Nature can be squarely blamed for my pink, throbbing forehead, it was America's infantile drinking laws that had me gasping for a beer.  Oh, and this super hot dancer in her 'Seventies Funk' towelling not-hot-pants...(click the little play button on the bottom and you'll stay on this page)

You see, even in the desert, it seems that a cold beer can bedevil the souls of the under-21s.  So first, you have to stand in line and prove with a driving license that you have the moral strength to deal with fizzy, mildly intoxicating amber fluids.  Then the fun starts.  You CAN buy a beer at Coachella but only in 'designated drinking pens' ...and once you've fought your way through to the bar, you're stuck behind a chicken wire fence until you've finished your 7 dollar cup of warm Heineken.  Music festival a la Guantanamo Bay. 

Inevitably though, with my testicles hotter than the sun's core, I was keen to knock back a lager or twelve.  So I enjoyed most of the acts at an oblique angle, 2.3 miles from the stage.  Grandma Madge was a whirling squeaky dot in the distance. Half an hour late too, the bitch.

We had a lot of fun though - especially because we shunned camping in favour of a big house with a pool.  But the Pilton Pop Festival wins hands down - rain or shine, bring on 2007.

Comments

[BOTSKI]

ROBOTS! ROBOTS! ROBOTS!

DAFT PUNK UNDERSTAND DON'T THEY?

I REMEMBER LEFTFIELD, IN A FIELD, WITH 20 FOOT HIGH SPEAKERS, PLAYING SPACE SHANTY. THAT NIGHT, LUTON KNEW WHAT IT WAS TO LEAP TO THE SOUND OF DUBAWUBADUBAWUUWUUOUOUOUOW.

IT ALL LOOKED A BIT SANITISED IN THE DESERT. NOT A LOT TO FOCUS THE MIND. NO COLD. NO WILL IT WON'T IT RAIN. NO MORRIS DANCERS. NO SMELLY CAT.