5 Takeaways from Coachella 2026

It was an honour, a thrill and a proud milestone to be invited to Coachella with TagMix for both weekends this year, a festival I’ve followed with awe and intrigue since it first emerged in 1999.

This was my experience as a first-timer.

1. It’s ALL about the music

The Coachella of popular imagination and the Coachella on the ground are two very different things, I swiftly discovered. What I found was a festival built with a ruthless obsession around live music that I loved immediately.

Across 12 stages, the depth, care and range of the programming are extraordinary. Much of the noise around influencers, brands and optics feels like it has been generated by people who have never actually been there. The reality I got was a relentless, banging, diverse marathon of sets, throwing in every genre and demographic, the only commonality being the ability to leave a crowd spellbound and screaming for more.

2. Everyone’s a VIP

I expected more overt ‘status theatre’ than I found. At Coachella everyone is physically on the same level, there are no hulking VIP structures looming over the crowd, and GA still has the lion’s share of front-barrier access. For a festival of this scale, Coachella has a much more egalitarian feel than many of its peers in the US and Europe.

3. The desert is the real headliner

For all the megastar sets, surprise guests, celebrity sightings and fashion theatre, the thing that dominates Coachella most completely is the setting itself.

The mountains, the palms, the desert light, the golden haze, the strange clarity of the air. All of it is so overwhelming and so beautiful that much of the human spectacle fades into insignificance against its magic. It is one of the most strikingly arresting festival sites I have ever seen. Just being there is uplifting.

4. You do not need to be under 40 to enjoy it

Coachella is often presented as if it belongs mainly to the young, the hyper-online and the aesthetically over-invested. That was not my experience at all. At 50, I didn’t feel out of place for a second. If anything, the scale, rhythm and atmosphere of the festival lend themselves well to people who are happy to take it in their stride rather than charging at it with the urgency of youth.

5. Madonna is even more of a legend than I realised

Her appearance with Sabrina Carpenter may have carried the obvious symbolic weight, but seeing her, er, get into the groove with complete abandon in the crowd to Anyma was even more powerful. At a festival so often flattened into celebrity optics, that moment felt unusually pure. It said something deeper about why she has endured: she is still energised by the same love of music that brought all of us here in the first place.

Coachella has been caricatured online to the extreme. I’m very grateful to be able to vouch that the reality is more musically serious, more visually stunning and much more interesting than the myth.

🚀 Next stop: Stagecoach!