Coachella Madness

24/04/13

Ok so this blog is a little delayed and I have missed alot of details but i started writing it the day that i got back and so it sounds kinda funny and disjointed but meh. Im too busy to worry about little things like the public perspective on my english skills... I will include alot of photos too because i dont want to spam facebook anymore (well atleast not yet).

Wowie. Just got back fom Coachella and I am lost for words. It was incredible. My feet still ache, I have black bags under my eyes, I sound like a man and I have an ear infection from all the dust and bass and I feel fantastic! Ok where do I start…

Charlotte and I left on the bus in miserable sleeting rain for the airport on Wednesday night. I was still hungover from the night before but that didn’t matter I was too pumped up on excitement to care. We made it safely to san diego airport to meet her friend Ingvil who picked us up in the car. The next morning the three of us (all blonde and practically looking like sisters) walked down to pacific beach to have breakfast at Kono’s on the beach. And yes, I had a typical PLUS size American breakfast that even I could not finish.

Once home and all showered (needed to desperately shave my leggies, they hadn’t seen the sunlight in a while), we packed up the car and headed off to pick Jess and Bec from the airport. From there it was walmart for the essentials (and an extra tent) and some lunch and then we were on the road!!

We made it to the lineup for camping around 4.30 pm to wait in line… it took us 3hrs to get in but it was still fun. 

Everyone was playing music and drinking and sitting on the roofs of cars just generally being merry and excited. Only downside to that was we had to set an unfamiliar tent up in the dark. This new picture is of jess at our camp the next day.

Now for the festival, I am not going to go through it day by day. All I am going to say is that it was the best weekend of my trip so far! Yes, it even rivals spring break! (mainly because I think it was warmer, the only thing it was missing was a beach or a lake or just some mass body of water).

The people that I (not going to say we because more often than not I went off by myself to see a band the others didn’t want to) saw were:

-adrian lux

-alt j

-alex clare

-band of horses

-bat for lashes

-bingo players

-blur

-dog blood

-dropkick murphys

-father john misty

-fredde le grand

-grimes

-hot chip

-janelle monae

-johnny marr

-jurassic five

-local natives

-major lazer

-modest mouse

-of monsters and men

-passion pit

-pheonix

-red hot chilli peppers

-robert delong

-tame impala

-tegan and sara

-the lumineers

-the postal service

-the wombats

-the xx

-tommy trash

-two door cinema club

-vampire weekend

-wu-tang clan

-yeahyeahyeahs

My top 5 however, in no particular order, were: Two door cinema club, Tegan and Sara, Vampire Weekends, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Major Lazer.

One more thing I have to comment on is the mass amounts of Aussies that were there! I swear they would have been the highest represented country outside the US and maybe Canada… I saw Benny Kleist on the first night, Blair Walkington on the second night and then I met Luke, the brother of Josh Wale (a guy I had a group assignment at QUT with last year) at the phone charging station on the Saturday morning. It was good running into Josh and Luke because we hung out with them for the rest of festival and ran a mock with them.

One thing that I absolutely loved was going to dropkick murphies J I had never heard of them, but they were kinda irish-emo-indy-rock band based in boston…. Everytime the band started playing a fast song (which was pretty much everysong) a big circle of drunk guys started running around shoving and pushing and going crazy! Naturally Bec, Jess and I thought it was fabulous and made the Aussie guys take us in there! And we were right! We had so much fun! Sadly bec lost her phone (but don’t worry some kind soul returned it to us a few hours later), and we emerged looking like orphan kids from GOT, bedraggled, disgustingly sweaty and covered in dirt but all the better for it in the end.

Another awesome set was the major lazor set. Its going to be really hard to describe via text but ask Jess and she will agree it was crazy! First off I think they underestimated his popularity because he was on a smaller stage and the tent was absolutely chocka-block and spilling out the back and sides!  While there he instructed us to do californias biggest harlem shake, which (for those who don’t know) consisted of the crowd standing stock still for 20 or so seconds when the music was on and then just burst into crazy dance! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kEc9RFJP2E. Here is a very bad quality video of it that I found on youtube for it. I mean it takes a lot of character to manipulate a crowd of so many. We watched a few other acts try to do it and fail miserably.

At one stage he also made every single one of us (and yes the whole crowd obeyed) crouch down to the ground and then explode into action on the drop! One last thing was for one of his songs he got everyone (guys and girls) to take of their shirts and swing them in the air, followed by everyone chucking them up and swapping them over (I did not do this… no way did I want to put on some sweaty guys shirt afterwards… and for the record I was wearing bikinis so it wasn’t as inappropriate as it sounds).

Another fun thing was celebrating 4/20. So I had no idea what it was but 4/20 day is basically America’s national smoke (weed) day. They had big banners coming off the back of planes and everyone was smoking. A lot of the bands that night did tributes to the day and made everyone light up at once. It was so funny to watch!

To quickly comment on the fashion scene… well it was definitely well… different. There were some out to make a statement that is for sure! I saw one man in a mankini, and it was safe to say that they guys in the line to get in after him left a lot of space between his butt cheeks and themselves. Another common occurrence were girls wearing nothing but nipple covers…. Yep that and just wearing g-bangers… I personally don’t have the self-confidence to pull that off (not that I would actually want to). 

But yes genreally speaking we had a great time! Met lots of wonderful people and left feeling the $340ticket was well worth it!!! (pr splendour... i'm talking to you when i say rip off! :'( )

Anyway hopefully the next blog will be sooner... althoguh i doubt it. probably will be written when i am on my way to colombia!!!! 9 days to go now!

Adios!

Dee