A person wears a Justin Bieber shirt during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, U.S., on Saturday.Daniel Cole/Reuters
Saturday Night in Coachella featured a bananas mainstage set by Justin Bieber in front of high-profile fans Katy Perry and her boyfriend Justin Trudeau. Not only was the whole thing streamed live on YouTube, but the online video-sharing platform so much as served as Bieber’s duet partner during a medley of old hits.
As the late Hockey Night in Canada broadcaster Bob Cole used to say, “Oh, baby.”
Bieber was headlining his first Coachella Festival, a taste-making, two-weekend event held annually at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif. It represented the Canadian pop star’s biggest concert since he cancelled a 2022 tour because of health issues.
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He took the stage before midnight, well after his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs had lost their fifth consecutive game. Wearing a hoodie, the 32-year-old enigma initially performed more than a dozen songs, in full or in part, almost exclusively drawn from his 2025 albums Swag and Swag II.
Pop singer Perry posted a video and photo gallery on Instagram: Drink cups in hand, she and Trudeau swayed to Speed Demon, the former prime minister embracing the California Gurls singer lovingly.
Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry are shown in this photo posted on Perry's Instagram account. (Instagram, @katyperry)HO/The Canadian Press
The 54-year-old Montrealer wore an Alouettes cap backward, just like the young bros do. How far will he go with the sartorial cringe? Just watch him.
Bieber’s Speed Demon is a funky tune about ambition and evolution: “And I achieve greatness, gettin’ better by the second…we ain’t finished just yet.“ His Coachella gig is part of a comeback campaign that began with the two Swag records and continued with his show-stealing performance earlier this year at the Grammy Awards. Perry, at 41, is a nostalgia act. Trudeau is a nepotism outcome looking for a second career.
All three of them, then, thirsting in the desert for relevance.
Things went quasi-karaoke when the enigmatic Bieber pulled up a stool and pulled out his laptop to croon along to YouTube videos of his teen-idol material, starting with the 2010 hit Baby. (The same song was sardonically covered at the festival by indie-rock darlings Geese earlier in the day.)
I can’t pretend to know what went into his decision to reach back into his kid’s music canon. He stayed clear of that material during his two recent warm-up shows at the Troubadour and the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles. The half-hearted versions at Coachella may have been designed to either appease his longtime fans or punk them − or both.
The singer is either playing 3D chess or he is eating the pieces.
Bieber put away his MacBook for a five-song finale of current material and guest artists, including producer/recording artist Dijon on Devotion.
The critics’ reviews were positive, but came with reservations. The Guardian’s Adrian Horton gave the Biebs three stars out of five for a performance that was “frustrating” but “endearing.”
Rolling Stone’s Jeff Miller judged the highly anticipated event to be a “messy” mixed bag: “It’s likely that plenty of Beliebers left satiated, but that’s not the arbiter of a successful festival set. With the opportunity to make a huge impact on a stage and festival he clearly feels is important, Bieber missed the mark…”
Bieber performs again next weekend at Coachella. Will the oddball presentation of his early fan-loved material be repeated? Will out-of-place politicians be among the crowd?
The Baby star seems to be committed to the present, not the past. Maybe he believes in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s notion that “nostalgia is not a strategy.” Or perhaps Trudeau (and Geese) told him that irony is always a better plan.