Coachella 2024: No Doubt dust off energetic, greatest hits set with assist from Olivia Rodrigo

Coachella 2024: No Doubt dust off energetic, greatest hits set with assist from Olivia Rodrigo
INDO-CA-APRIL 13, 2024: No Doubt performs at Coachella on Saturday, April 13, 2024. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

Coachella 2024: No Doubt dust off energetic, greatest hits set with assist from Olivia Rodrigo

Coachella,Homepage News,Breaking News

Mikael Wood April 14, 2024

Gwen Stefani wanted to get this straight.

You showed up to Coachella, Saturday night 2024, she asked, to see No Doubt play together on this stage for the first time in nine years? Dressed in a shredded plaid outfit, her blond hair twisted into a pair of knots atop her head, the 54-year-old frontwoman was addressing the gigantic crowd gathered before the festivals main stage for just that purpose.

Are you crazy?

That was one way to explain why No Doubt the beloved ska-punk band from Anaheim that exploded with 1995s Tragic Kingdom, making Stefani a major pop star, before eventually drifting apart in 2015 had returned to such a heros welcome at Coachella, where the group was billed in a kind of sub-headlining slot occupied in recent years by Calvin Harris and Swedish House Mafia.

It took Bradley Nowell’s son years to embrace Sublime. Now he’ll lead the band at Coachella

Yet Stefani and her bandmates werent the only 90s-rock veterans at the festival this year: Just before No Doubt on Saturday came performances by Blur and by a new version of Sublime featuring the son of the late Bradley Nowell, who died in 1996 just as the Long Beach band was about to join No Doubt in the big leagues. Classic KROQ-era alternative rock, it seems, is all the rage again not merely thanks to reunited OGs but among guitar-wielding young stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, the latter of whom joined No Doubt at Coachella (dressed in a No Doubt T-shirt, no less) to sing the jaunty Bathwater.

Here Stefani demonstrated how tightly shes maintained her grip on her live-wire stage presence despite the fact that shes spent much of the past decade doing soft-focus TV (as a judge on The Voice) and trying her hand at soft-focus country music (with her husband, the Nashville star Blake Shelton). She skanked, she jump-kicked, she did push-ups; she climbed a lighting rig to conduct the crowd in singing a few lines of No Doubts hit Just a Girl. Her vocals were strong throughout the show, with little in the way of evident backing tracks; repertoire-wise, the band stuck to the classics Hella Good, Ex-Girlfriend, Underneath It All, Spiderwebs and reached back for the thrashing Total Hate 95 (originally a duet with Sublimes Nowell) and for a cover of Madness One Step Beyond.

Emotionally, Stefani was perhaps a bit less in touch with her material than you mightve wanted. Simple Kind of Life, which she wrote about her dreams for her relationship with her first husband, rocker Gavin Rossdale, had little of the yearning she tapped into on 2000s Return of Saturn

.; she sang the song at At the festival, Coachella it sounded

almost

as like

a taunt, as though she were making fun of her younger, more vulnerable self.

Yet she found her way deep into the drama of No Doubts finest song, the deathless power ballad Dont Speak, which depicts her long-ago breakup with the bands bassist, Tony Kanal. As she sang it Saturday, cameras fed extreme closeups of her face to the enormous video screens flanking the stage, and you felt as though you could see all those old memories flooding into her mind.

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