The Stone Roses and Blur will swap places on the bill for the second weekend of the Coachella festival in California, with Madchester now opening for Britpop. The announcement follows a disappointing first Friday night, when the Roses drew a conspicuously small crowd, apparently because many festival-goers had never heard of the band.
For the second year running, Coachella is being staged over consecutive weekends, with the same acts appearing on the bill, as with the Reading and Leeds festivals in the UK. Phoenix will again headline on Saturday night, while the Red Hot Chili Peppers return to finish proceedings this Sunday.
For Friday, however, there seems to have been a change of plan. On Wednesday afternoon, the Coachella website simply posted a new lineup that showed the Stone Roses would start their set at 9.55pm while Blur would close the same main stage at 11.35pm. No reason has been given for the switch, but the Roses could be forgiven for expecting it.
"There was something strange about seeing this most iconic of bands shuffling through Fools Gold to a crowd one-fifth of the size of Tegan and Sara's next door," Tim Jonze wrote in the Guardian, and Billboard claimed that Passion Pit and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs both played to larger audiences, earlier in the evening.
Despite the band's legendary status in the UK, only one of the Stone Roses group's singles, Love Spreads, ever cracked the Billboard Hot 100, and neither of their albums have reached gold sales. Compare this to Blur: 1.5m LPs sold in the US, plus runoff from Gorillaz' three top 20 albums.
Still, despite appearances, it's not clear that the Roses have really been demoted. While Coachella's principal lineup announcement gave the Roses top billing, another graphic, issued at the same time, gave the honour to Blur. Even if they didn't predict the Coachella crowds' ambivalent response to I Wanna Be Adored, organisers may have planned the lineup switch all along.
