Some of music’s biggest stars and most promising up-and-comers spent the weekend in the desert for round one of Coachella, and Audacy’s KROQ crew was there to catch up with them all including Blur, Bleachers, Deftones, The Last Dinner Party, and Jamie xx.
LISTEN NOW : Blur joins Audacy’s KROQ at Coachella
As thousands gathered in the desert for the first time since last year’s epic two-weekend festival, so did Blur , who have been very selective with their live shows, but admitted they couldn’t miss out on the opportunity to play Coachella once again.
“We got a phone call at about 10 o’clock at night,” Blur’s Damon Albarn said of getting the Coachella offer before bandmate, Alex James added, “Which is not normally a good thing when it’s management calling at 10 o’clock at night.”
Albarn continued, “[They] were like, ‘Do you want to do Coachella this year? You have five minutes to decide.’ We were just like, ‘I know we said we weren’t going to do anything, but we’ll do one more.” Added James, “This was just a wonderful opportunity, the greatest show on earth. It’s the biggest festival on the planet — if I wasn’t here, I’d have FOMO.”
“It's completely different in a way and completely the same,” Albarn said of returning to the festival. “When we start playing again, it's just exactly the same as it was at the first for me,” Alex adds. “I think it's important not to think about it too much, really,” Damon expressed. "Especially when you're sort of carrying your past revue. You know, some of the songs we play are like 30-plus years old now.”
Aside from the festival, the guys shared their thoughts on the idea of feature films being made about the band, (an appalling idea to Albarn). Despite his disgust, two films are in the works -- one being a documentary on the return of Blur. Alex explains, “It's eight years since we last did anything, you know. Even when we actually split up, it didn't take that long to kind of get it together. So, there was a certain amount of kind of jeopardy, potentially, at the beginning, like trying to make a new record at this stage of your career. Most bands don't even like each other 30 years in, let alone make a half-decent record. I suppose there was a lot to play for… if you like, the band it's a good watch. We filmed the shows at Wembley.”
“I never thought I'd love Wembley,” Damon added. “First night was great, and then the next day, I didn't want to do another gig. I really was trying to find reasons to cancel it. I was sort of sitting in a hotel at Wembley Park… just watching all these people coming in, and it's like, ‘Well, I can't cancel that, and actually it was like maybe the best. It was weird. I was really not into going on stage -- and then I was on stage -- and it was one of the ones [you won't forget.]"
WATCH NOW : Blur at Coachella
Blur weren’t the only repeat Coachella performers over the weekend, Bleachers were also present and ready to hop on stage together again and brave the Coachella sun. “It does feel different,” Jack Antonoff said of his time at the festival. “The longer a band is together, the more you understand your audience, so then when you come to places like this, you kind of see each other in a different way. A headline show is obviously your show, but at a festival you kind of start to notice your people, and the longer a band’s together, the more intense that connection is.”
LISTEN NOW : Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff joins Audacy’s KROQ at Coachella
“I can just tell,” he says of the band’s followers. “I'm like, ‘Oh, you're my people,’ I can just see it. Sometimes it's literal, you know, there's a little pin or something, but it's more just a feeling, especially when you're at a festival and there's a lot of people who might just see you for the first time or random people. You just see your people and it kind of makes you connect in an extra deep way, like seeing your friend in public or something.”
Jack’s enthusiasm for performing hasn’t seemed to reach a peak, which is something he tends to realize when arriving in cities and venues while on tour. “I feel like anywhere you are, you could either bring a level of cynicism or the opposite and you never want to be in these rare, interesting environments and think about it from a s***ty point of view. That's what touring is like, you could get wrapped up in how tired you are and how much you've been on tour or you could just be like, ‘Jesus, I can't believe we're here.’”
“That's what I feel about days like today,” he adds. “I could be like, ‘It's hot, it's dusty’ -- or you could be like, ‘Holy s**t!’ Also, there's not a lot of room for cynicism shows because everyone went through so much to be there, especially festivals.”
Bleachers dropped their fourth studio album earlier this year, and looking back on the experience, Jack says “it felt bold every time we were in the studio, it just felt like we understood what the band could be more and more and more and we're just like kind of going ape s*** on it. It's nice to get to the point where you care so much about your audience and then also don't give a f** what anyone else thinks… This album is just like us grinding our heels into what we are.” Finally, Jack adds, “This album, we're firing on every cylinder.”
WATCH NOW : Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff at Coachella
Among more established bands like Bleachers and Blur who have played Coachella a number of times, there were also some new-comers including The Last Dinner Party who made their Coachella debut at this year’s festival.
LISTEN NOW : Last Dinner Party joins Audacy’s KROQ at Coachella
“Literally just got here, and I don't know what's going on,” singer Abigail Morris of The Last Dinner Party told KROQ’s Nicole Alvarez while backstage in her first-timers awe. Bassist Georgia Davies added, “When we got booked for it, it was like, ‘holy s***!’ It's one of those things that you always kind of hear about and see on Instagram and everything, and it's one of those places that we would never, as people who live in the U.K., would afford to be able to go and attend. The lineup is always so incredible, so to be able to come and play, it's just like, ‘Oh my God!’”
Speaking on the inception of the group, which as host Nicole points out interweaves “enchanting and dangerous, beautiful and scary,” Abigail explains, “the magic of us is that we are five very distinct kind of separate personalities and stories and aesthetics. And yet, what's great about the TLDP world is that they all work together kind of like symbiotically. And I think we have a lot of similar aesthetic things because, you know, we're all in prairie dresses… but it's not like a uniform, it's not one distinct thing that we all adhere to. It's sort of everyone's sensibilities coming together into one massive nebulous cloud that kind of makes the world.”
Previewing this weekend’s set, Abigail explained, “We've just been on this North American tour and I feel like none of us have really had stage fright this whole time, we've just kind of been like ‘Cool show. Do it. Fine.’ This is the first time I have got stage fright in months because I think it's exciting, it's challenging. This is such a new world and we're playing to a ton of people who maybe don't know who we are, instead of playing to fans, and that's really fun because then we get to kind of prove ourselves.”
WATCH NOW : Last Dinner Party at Coachella
Not all first-timers at this year’s festival were new. Deftones made their Coachella debut this weekend as one of the more surprising additions to the epic, two-weekend lineup. Abe Cunningham and Chino Moreno stopped by backstage to chat and detail how the opportunity came to be.
LISTEN NOW : Deftones join Audacy’s KROQ at Coachella
“We were asked, I guess that's the quickest, easiest answer I got,” said Chino. “I don't think we expected it either," Abe added. “It was honestly the first time we were asked to do it,” Chino shared. “In the beginning, we weren't quite sure if we were or not -- and it was kind of last minute that we just pulled the trigger.”
Looking back on the band after spending decades making music together, Chino admits, “it's weird with our career. it's such a slow build. It still feels like we're still building for some crazy reason after 30 years. I've never felt like one day just like I woke up and went like, ‘wow,’ because it's been so gradual.”
“When I do look back in retrospect, I mean, it's crazy. [Abe] and I talk about it all the time, you know, we've known each other since the seventh grade,” he explains, “when we were just little kids skateboarding behind the school getting in trouble… It's crazy to think back that we're here now and still doing it after all these years.”
“I don't know if there's an end goal,” Chino continues. “I think the consistency and always trying to expand a little bit musically… We've been making music like I said, since we were kids, and you would think at some point we would run out of ideas, but it's weird. We get together and we just start making sounds and everybody gets excited.”
“I think time too,” Abe adds. “Time is a trip because we started in 1988 man. You know, had a record deal in the early nineties and stuff. Just the fact that there's been a lot of growing at that time, you know, there's been many, many ups and downs. There's been great highs and you know, really, really, really sunken deep lows too. But it's kind of a trip -- we're just kind of chipping away. We go home, we take breaks now and it's not this constant grind anymore.”
Deftones’ ninth studio album, Ohms was released in 2020, and although the band hasn’t spoken much about its follow-up, there are now rumblings of something on the horizon. "We've just sort of been working on and off over the last year and a half from when we started writing,” says Chino. "Basically, where we're sitting right now is we have a whole record recorded all musically. And it's pretty much my job right now to finish up the vocals.”
"I have, obviously, this show again next week, and then straight after that, I go back home to Oregon and I go in the studio,” he explained. "So as long as that takes. I hate to put a definite kind of timeframe… we're not really in a rush. We want it to be great. I think that's most important. But it is coming and it's really good. We're really excited with what we've been working on. Overall, it's an invigorated kind of sound. We hadn't written a record since what was it, pre-COVID, I think, when we were last in the studio.”
He continues, “We've been playing shows, but we hadn't really got into being creative. The creative part, to me, is always kind of the funnest part of being in this band. Performing is great, but coming up with something out of nothing, that feeling cannot be topped."
"And so when you get in the room with your friends, we're laughing, we're having fun and then someone does something and then I react to it or they react to what I'm doing, it goes in a circle and then, all of a sudden, we lift our heads up and there's something that exists that didn't exist before we walked in that room.”
WATCH NOW : Deftones at Coachella
Lastly, KROQ wrapped up weekend one with a familiar face, Jamie xx, who is normally found saving the day at Coachella with his band The xx . This year, he spoke with KROQ’s Nicole Alvarez about how he was doing things a little different this year as he planned to take the stage later that night to perform a three-hour DJ set in the new pyramid-shaped Quasar. While the performance is one he says there’s no real way to prepare for, he looked forward to the excitement of the unknown.
LISTEN NOW : Jamie xx joins Audacy’s KROQ at Coachella
“I think the best thing about it is the jeopardy of not really knowing what anybody else is going to do,” he shared. “I mean, I found loads of music, I got loads of my new music to play… I know those guys pretty well and we've played together before, but it's all up in the air at the moment.”
Now in his mid-thirties, Jamie reflected on the times he first remembered experimenting with sound at the ripe age of nine. “There was a CD that came in a cereal box, CD-ROM, and it was like a very basic music remixing program where it gave you just little samples to put together,” he recalled. “That kind of just made me fall in love with it — and I worked out how to crack the thing so that I could make my own music in it instead of use the little samples and everything else just went from there.”
While he took on Coachella solo this year, Jamie xx is looking ahead to new music with The xx, revealing that he’s caught as many of Romy’s shows as he could when they happened to be in the same town. “We've been in the studio once a month for a week, a month for a few months now and it's great, just sort of getting back into the rhythm of how to be with each other and work instead of just hanging out with friends. It's been lovely.”
Hear more about Jamie xx’s set, plus get additional content from Blur, Deftones, Bleachers, and The Last Dinner Party, by checking out all of KROQ’s interviews from Coachella above.
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