Coachella, officially the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, is a festival held every spring at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, in the California desert.
It started on 9 and 10 October 1999, just two months after a troubled Woodstock revival had made everyone wary of big festivals, with Beck, Tool and Rage Against the Machine as headliners and The Chemical Brothers lower down the bill. The heat was brutal, the books did not balance, and there was no edition in 2000; it came back in 2001 as a one-day event and later grew into two consecutive three-day weekends with the same line-up. Its most celebrated night came on 14 April 2018, when Beyoncé became the first Black woman to headline, reuniting on stage with Destiny’s Child, and fans promptly renamed the whole event Beychella. In between, Coachella invented a dress code of its own, endlessly photographed and occasionally imitated far from any desert.