Queen Bee bows out of this year's Coachella

Feb. 23, 2017 3:26 PM PT

Beyoncé, who is pregnant with twins, is bowing out of her April 15 and 22 headlining performances at the sold-out 2017 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio. She will instead perform next year at the festival, which draws 20 percent of it nearly 100,000 dailly attendees from San Diego County.

Her decision to pull out of the 2017 lineup was jointly announced by Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment and Goldenvoice, the festival’s producer.

“Following the advice of her doctors to keep a less rigorous schedule in the coming months, Beyoncé has made the decision to forgo performing at the 2017 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival,” the statement said.

“However, Goldenvoice and Parkwood are pleased to confirm that she will be a headliner at the 2018 festival. Thank you for your understanding.”

No replacement has been announced yet for Beyoncé, who earlier this month won two Grammy Awards and gave a socially charged acceptance speech. This year’s other Coachella headliners are Radiohead and Kendrick Lamar.

Had she performed in April at Coachella as scheduled, she would have been the first female artist to headline the festival since Bjork in 2007.

All tickets to the 2017 Coachella festival sold out within three hours of going on sale on Jan. 3. The 2015 edition, which was headlined by Drake, AC/DC and Jack White, sold out in just 40 minutes.
Twitter @georgevarga; george.varga@sduniontribune.com

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George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”