The standard response to telling someone you’re going to Coachella is 'I hate you SO MUCH right now'. That’s because Coachella is the coolest festival in the world and pretty much everybody wants to go.

It's also the cleanest festival on the planet. Combine that with the setting - a beautiful polo club with manicured lawns in Palm Springs, and the weather (you’re looking at an average of 34°) and all of a sudden you understand the huge amounts of buzz around this annual event and why it’s spawned such a huge party scene on its fringes.

All of these factors build massive expectations. Which makes you wonder, can Coachella actually live up to the hype? Is it actually cool? We decided that you, the people, need answers, so we (I) went last weekend. Don't you all hate me so much right now?

The short (and unhelpful) answer is that it both does and doesn’t live up to the hype. It manages to be incredibly cool and yet incredibly uncool at the same time.

Lets get the negatives out of the way first. As you’d expect of any festival that is 15 years old, it’s quite corporate these days (how else could it be the highest grossing festival ever to date?). The site is pottered with brand tents pushing hashtags in your face while trying to piggyback on your sunny mood. Airplanes circle the sky advertising everything from TV shows to condoms. It’s predominately white, which is weird given that California is such a melting pot racially. A pint of strongbow will set you back $9 (that’s about £6, for STRONGBOW).  And staff on the whole are pretty militant, plus you’re made to constantly scan in and out of different areas with your electronic wristband. That means they know where you are in the venue. POLICE STATE MUCH?

Having said all of that, it’s still a brilliant festival that’s worth experiencing, not least because of the oasis like desert setting, the great food vans (including Kobi, the original Californian food van that started a whole street food revolution over there), weird and wonderful art installations, light that means you don’t even need to bother with a filter on Instagram, and *that* ferris wheel. It really is clean too - people rarely leave rubbish and there are litter pickers anyway, so you can plonk yourself down anywhere without worrying about sitting on a half eaten burrito. And mystifyingly the portaloos always have toilet roll and don’t smell despite the scorching temperatures. All little things, but they can amount to the difference between a sad and happy emoticon on whatsapp.

However, what makes Coachella feel legitimately cool is the people. Yeah, there are lots of ‘basic bitches’ there (they're the girls in neon and aggressively branded tops Instagramming literally everything), and it’s frequently described (and dismissed) as ‘ a convention of beautiful people listening to music’, which admittedly is kind of is. But that’s not the whole picture. There may well be an unbelievable amount of extraordinarily good-looking humans striding between the stages, but it’s easy to forgive them for winning the genetic lottery because they’re pretty much all lovely, friendly, polite people who fully understand the concept of personal space (even the try-hards that are off their faces dancing to Fatboy Slim).

Anyone who has been to a British festival will know this is not the norm. This general attitude means that in addition to not being constantly barged and having drinks spilt on you by strangers, you have enjoyable conversations with randoms. People offer help too if they see you looking lost (or struggling to take a selfie with a giant astronaut in the background). And there's a mixture of generations milling round, including entire grown families just chilling out smoking weed together. It's quite heartening to see actually, especially when the (twenty something) kids responsibly disguard of the butts in the nearby bins when they're done. See: cool and clean.

Click through the gallery to see the snaps from our road trip to Coachella in the GLA class with Mercedes Benz.

Image credits: Kelly Bowerbank, G.Seitz, Mercedez Benz

Find out what the biggest trends from Coachella 2014 were here.