Coachella Festival 2006 Highlights

Below are some photos taken by Wendy Lynch at last weekend’s seventh annual Coachella Festival, which took place on April 29th and 30th on a desert polo field in Indio, California. As usual, it was hot as hell and very crowded (they estimate that this might be the most attended Coachella to date), as Tool fans mingled with Madonna fans. There were many highlights at this year’s festival. Day one highlights included: watching Kanye West do the ‘Molly Ringwald’ dance to a-ha’s 1985 hit “Take on Me,” spotting Danny DeVito watching avant-garde rockers Deerhoof from the side of the stage, Depeche Mode doing classics like “Personal Jesus,” and the spectacle of seeing Daft Punk dressed like robots as they played behind a pyramid of flashing lights. Day two highlights included: The Dears playing seven new songs, and all of them sounding great, Metric’s extended version of “Dead Disco” (with Emily Haines purposefully misquoting John F. Kennedy), Jamie Lidell’s self-sampling and looped Warp-soul, Gnarls Barkley taking the stage dressed like characters from The Wizard of Oz (Danger Mouse was the Tin Man and Cee-Lo was the Cowardly Lion), Editors almost covering Madonna, seeing but not really hearing Madonna on a video screen, almost all of Massive Attack’s set (despite Liz Fraser not quite delivering on “Teardrop”), The Go! Team’s Ninja doing the ‘dances of the world’ at the end of “Ladyflash,” Dungen’s flute solo, and watching Art Brut being dragged off the stage as they performed past the curfew. Read a full review of the 2006 Coachella festival in Under the Radar’s summer issue, due out in July. (Words by Mark Redfern / Photos by Wendy Lynch) (www.coachella.com)

Day One

Day Two