As you may have noticed from my instagrams, I have been out of the UK a lot recently and during April I embarked on a work trip to the US that lasted almost a month.
The first stop of my trip was Palm Springs to attend the Coachella music festival – something I was both excited and slightly apprehensive about.
Being a Somerset girl and growing up in close proximity to Glastonbury, this is really the only festival I knew and I was intrigued to see if Coachella was really the cleaner, warmer, glossier version of its muddy UK based relation I imagined it would be.
So on Friday morning we embarked on our drive from LA to Palm Springs to get our Coachella experience started. The drive is about 2.5 hours on a normal day, but with a large percentage of LA residents doing exactly the same journey, ours lasted around 6!
With some good tunes on in the car and plenty of snacks we wound down the windows and took in some of the desert sites, including the iconic wind turbines and random dinosaur park which could be seen on many an attendee’s social feeds!
One of the first and major differences I noted between Glastonbury and Coachella was that no one really stays on site. Everyone stays in nearby hotels and houses where the party continues outside festival hours; and we were no exception. We hired a gorgeous house in the nearby La Quinta which was set against the iconic mountain range, and it wasn’t long before it became the backdrop of our first Coachella images!
Unlike Glasto where you wake up, brush off the dried mud and crack open another bottle of cider before grabbing a stage-side falafel burger, Coachella days are filled with sunbathing, long lunches and glamorous pool parties as a pre cursor to what is predominantly an evening event.
The drive in on that first afternoon was spectacular; there is something about sunshine and palm trees that puts everyone in an upbeat mood. The festival is held at the expansive Empire Polo Fields, which turn into the music capital of California for these two weekends a year.
The manicured lawns are taken over by various art installations including a giant moving astronaut, psychedelic twister and of course the iconic ferris wheel, which form useful meeting points and provide numerous photo opportunities throughout the weekend.
Being quite a pop fan, the bands I was looking forward to seeing were the better known commercial acts such as Outkast, Pharrell and Calvin Harris. Whilst Calvin Harris (more later) and Pharell were just as brilliant as I had imagined, Outkast were really disappointing with bad sound and a general lack of enthusiasm.
Performances that I really enjoyed during the weekend included Lorde, Bastille, Solange (with Beyonce surprising her on stage), Rudimental, MGMT and my recent discovery/current obsession, Haim.
The food at Coachella was some of the best and undoubtedly the most varied I have ever experienced. Everything was fresh and the choice was immense. Some of the region’s best loved restaurants such as Sugarfish Sushi and Bar Ama Tex Mex were present in street van form and even ice lollies were of the ‘gourmet’ variety.
I pretty much survived the weekend on the most delicious tacos and fresh coconut water which were offered in abundance; there was not a single greasy burger or limp hot dog in sight.
We kicked off day 2 with brunch at the Ace Hotel, which is one of the go-to destinations during Coachella. The hotel & swim club is a refurbished 50’s motel & diner that has retained its retro feel and offers some of the best pancakes I have tasted in the USA. During festival season it is swarming with hipsters and bikini clad girls indulging in the daily pool action.
Pool parties are as much part of the Coachella culture as the action on the festival grounds themselves and if you are staying in a neighbouring hotel, they are totally unavoidable! We stopped by the Lacoste party on Saturday and caught some rays by a pool filled with inflatable crocodiles and cooled down with patron laced ice lollies.
Saturday evening was packed full of acts I wanted to see, so I spent the night catching up with friends and dancing the night away to MGMT and Muse, only later noticing Leonardo DiCaprio doing the same thing beside me!
Celebrities are everywhere at Coachella and almost any way you turned you could spot one wandering freely and soaking up the atmosphere with their friends relatively undisturbed…..Well until the Saturday night sandstorm hit and everyone was forced to either gown up like a desert nomad or retreat to the sand-free safety of a nearby after-party. Finding our ride home that night was not a lot of fun!
On Sunday we headed to the Viceroy hotel in Palm Springs for lunch and to catch up with some of the girls who were being hosted by Guess. The Guess party was in full swing by midday, so we grabbed our Espresso Martinis and found a quieter spot to relax, before making our way to the festival for the final night.
We marked our last evening with a trip on the infamous Ferris wheel which offered a spectacular birds eye view of the festival grounds, which was beginning to fill up with final night revellers.
Calvin Harris’ Sunday night set proved to be my most memorable moment of the weekend. Fireworks and lasers lit the sky as we toasted Coachella friends old and new in a moment reminiscent of my beloved Ibiza summers. The grounds were packed (the 2nd largest crowd in the festival’s history) and the energy was electric, as what seemed like the whole of Coachella let loose and danced to the DJs vibrant playlist which helped to bring the weekend to a close.
Check out the video above of those final moments and stay tuned for the next installment of my US trip —> L.A
As you may have noticed from my instagrams, I have been out of the UK a lot recently and during April I embarked on a work trip to the US that lasted almost a month.
