Gwen Stefani was eager to clarify this. “You came to Coachella on Saturday night in 2024 to watch No Doubt perform live together for the first time in nine years?” she inquired.
The 54-year-old frontwoman was speaking to the enormous throng that had assembled in front of the festival’s main stage just for that reason.
She was wearing a ripped plaid costume and had her blond hair tied into two knots atop her head. “Are you nuts?”
That would help to explain why No Doubt, the adored Anaheim ska-punk band that shot to fame in 1995 with the hit song “Tragic Kingdom,” which turned Stefani into a major pop star, eventually drifted apart in 2015.
The group was greeted with such heroism at Coachella, where they were scheduled in a slot that had previously been occupied by Calvin Harris and the Swedish House Mafia.
But Stefani and her bandmates weren’t the only 90s rock veterans present at the festival this year. It appears that vintage KROQ-era alternative rock is making a comeback.
This isn’t only because the original members of the genre are getting back together; guitar-wielding up-and-coming talents like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, who performed with No Doubt at Coachella, are also fans of the genre.
In spite of spending the majority of the last ten years working on soft-focus TV and attempting her hand at soft-focus country music, Stefani showed here how firmly she has held onto her electrifying stage presence.
Gwen Stefani’s Coachella Confession
She performed push-ups, skanked, jump-kicked, and even climbed a lighting rig to lead the audience in a few lines of the smash song “Just a Girl” by No Doubt.
Her vocals were strong throughout the show, with little in the way of obvious backing tracks.
She wrote about her fantasies for her marriage to rock star Gavin Rossdale in “Simple Kind of Life,” but it lacked much of the longing she found in “Return of Saturn” (2000).
It seemed, at the festival, almost like a taunt, as if she was mocking her more vulnerable, younger self.
Nevertheless, she managed to immerse herself in the drama of No Doubt’s best song, the lifeless power ballad “Don’t Speak,” which portrays her past split with bassist Tony Kanal.
You could almost feel all of her old memories pouring back into her head when she performed it.
It became evident right away that frontwoman Gwen Stefani of No Doubt wasn’t “just” anything when the band made their breakthrough with “Just a Girl” over 30 years ago.
And Stefani demonstrated that the band’s breakthrough smash and the band itself are still essential in their third decade of existence with a main-stage reunion at Coachella.
