Festival season has officially started, with one of the years earliest festivals, Coachella, taking place between April 15th – 17th.
It is also taking place between 22nd 24th April, because Coachella happens twice each year, on two weekends, a practice they have done since 2011.
In 2022 the festival had over 150 acts performing across 7 stages over 3 days.
Tangent – I just read the line-up for Coachella 2022, and as I was browsing the dozens of bands (and the few I had heard of) I saw that Danny Elfman was performing? I honestly didn’t know he did more than movie music.
100 Gecs
However, this post isn’t about all of the bands playing, but instead about one specific band; 100 Gecs.
Or more precisely, how they were treated during their set.
On Saturday 16th April, 100 Gecs played a 40-minute slot on the Mojave stage.
The set was going well and the band had just started playing their smash hit song, Money Machine.
However, part-way through the song, a Roadie came on stage and unplugged the sound, basically saying that the band had gone over their allotted time and it was time to leave.
This, obviously, caused quite the reaction online.
Reaction
I originally heard about this on Twitter as a user posted a video of it, along with a Tweet heavily criticising Coachella, saying they were being very disrespectful.
The replies to this tweet were one of two reactions:
That the band is awful and should have had the sound cut much earlier
Or the other opinion, that Coachella were awful and unprofessional and the band had only about a minute of song left and they should have let them finish the song.
However one person mentioned that Coachella have always had a strict no-over time policy for any non-headliner bands.
So the question is, were Coachella in the right when they cut the sound?
Other times bands have been cut off
This is obviously not the first time that a band has had their set cut short by the organisers, so let’s look at some memorable other incidents.
I Heart Radio – 2002
Green Day were performing at the I Heart Radio music festival in 2002.
However, the festival wanted to give usher more time, and so decided to cut Green Days 45-minute set down to just 20-minutes, without telling the band.
So, during the song Basket Case, the band were informed that they only had one minute left of their time, when the band believed they had at least 20.
Billy Joe Armstrong, who was intoxicated, then had a rant about how disrespectful it was and destroyed his guitar on stage.
Billie Joe Armstrong later apologised and said he was stressed and suffering from addiction and checked himself into rehab after the incident.
Reading Festival 2010
In 2010, Guns N’ Roses played Reading and Leeds festival. Well, they were supposed to anyway.
At Reading, the band eventually showed up on stage a full 90 minutes late, while frontman Axl Rose acted as if he were entitled to do this as he was a famous rock musician.
The organisers felt differently however, and shut the bands music off at 11pm, as there was a strict sound curfew at this time.
The band tried to continue playing using a megaphone,. But soon gave it up and left the crowd angry and possibly wanting more, but not about to get any.
Guns N’ Roses however pushed back, saying that they had a deal in place with the festival to play past the 11pm curfew.
Fun fact, I was at this festival! You can read about my experience here.
The thing about each of these incidents however is that they aren’t really the same as the 100 Gecs one. Either the festival was entirely in the wrong, as with I Heart radio, or the band was entirely in the wrong as with Guns n Roses.
Was Coachella in the right?
So, was Coachella justified in cutting off the sound during 100 Gecs song? Let’s look at the arguments on both sides.
Yes
The simplest answer would be:
‘If Coachella have a policy that you can’t run over time, then you can’t run over time and they did nothing wrong by cutting the sound.’
It’s worth remembering that festivals have a lot of bands playing, and any time a band plays past their set time it nudges the changeover further along and can have a knock-on effect for all the other bands playing.
If every small band on that day ‘just played one extra song’, then that time would accumulate, and by the time of the headliner, they would have drastically less time to play before the festival had to end.
No
On the other hand, it seems that the band were not being given an indication of how long they have left to play.
This is a pretty normal and expected thing for festivals to do. If it didn’t happen, then its not really the bands fault that they ran over time.
NB: Even in the I heart radio video, we can see that the festival did explicitly show the band how long they had left (Seen at 0:53 in the above video), so this kind of thing is very common and just makes sense because otherwise how will the band know when to stop?
It is also pretty disrespectful to the band, not to mention the audience, to cut the band off during their most well-known song.
It seems that the band started late as well, and so had less time than they were assuming. Though this is really a point in favour of what Coachella did.
If the band set times were already getting away from them, then they likely needed to be more strict in having bands stop after their slot was done.
Without knowing the specifics of what happens (if the band were informed of their time, how explicit they were about not overstepping their time slot etc.) then it’s hard to know how justified they were.
Wrap up
I think this is definitely a mixed answer, because yes I think Coachella did act rashly and shouldn’t have cut the band off the way they did.
They should have given the band a warning that they were reaching the end of their set and maybe let the singers, Dylan and Laura, apologise to the audience and explain the situation.
However, I also think that the people outraged online are ignoring how difficult it is to keep a festival running smoothly.
It is a messy situation with a lot of nuance, but in general i think that Coachella had to cut the band off, but they should have given them fair warning first.
NB: Coachella haven’t put out any statement about this at the time of writing, and I think it’s unlikely that they will, unless there is a big pushback from the fans.
