75,000 PARISIANS IN PARADISE? MUST BE A COLDPLAY GIG...
Coldplay Stade de France, Paris Touring the UK until August 24 ★★★★★
Coldplay’s latest album, Music Of The Spheres, is the least satisfying of their career, and the worst-selling. But it still went to No1, just like its eight predecessors. With failures like theirs, who needs success?
On tour, Coldplay are still in their imperial phase. The biggest names measure out their massiveness in bookings at Wembley Stadium. This summer Harry Styles, now a global sensation, played two nights there, and Ed Sheeran five. Only Coldplay can manage six.
I caught them at Paris’s answer to Wembley, the Stade de France. It was here, at the Champions League final in May, that Liverpool’s travelling supporters were greeted with tear gas.
Determined to show that they haven’t learnt their lesson, the police again bring out the armoured vehicles and automatic weapons. You can tell the security forces have lost the plot when they see Coldplay fans as a threat.
Inside the ground the mood is quite different – all sweetness and light. Most of the ticket-holders are couples and many have brought the kids. The pitch is a riot of colour (maybe that’s what the police were afraid of).
Coloured beachballs are bobbing about above the fans’ heads.
Chris Martin is wearing a multicoloured T-shirt and a pair of kaleidoscopic athleisure trousers. Whatever it was that propelled him to the top, it wasn’t his dress sense.
But it may well have been his energy. If the hardest-working man in stadium pop is still Mick Jagger, now 79, then Martin, a mere boy of 45, can give him a run for his money. By the end of the third song, Paradise, his buoyancy has infected the whole crowd. It’s like being at a children’s party with 75,000 guests.
For The Scientist, from Coldplay’s earnest, early days, the mood changes and the video screens go black-and-white. But there’s still a mass singalong, which gets even bigger as Martin’s bandmates pop up on the B stage and launch into Viva La Vida. It’s acoustic, but also electric.
Those rousing oh-whoahs are accompanied by columns of fire and blizzards of tickertape, although darkness has yet to descend. At a normal gig nobody goes this early with the special effects, but Coldplay deploy them like choruses: if in doubt, just repeat.
Ten years ago they made a breakthrough in open-air gig design, handing out plastic wristbands fitted with an LED light that could flash in time with the music (the inventor responsible, Jason Regler, had the idea while he was at a Coldplay show, watching them play Fix You). It was a stroke of genius, turning a football ground into a galaxy and making every spectator part of the spectacle.
Now that their party trick has been copied by other acts, including Lady Gaga on her current tour, Coldplay face a dilemma: whether or not to stick with it. They find a superb solution by taking the technology a step further. I won’t say how, in case you’re going.
There are several new tricks too: alien heads for the whole band, a puppet that looks suspiciously like Miss Piggy, Martin accompanying his own prerecorded voice with sign language.
Where most stadium acts go from the A stage to the B stage and back again, Coldplay go from A to B to A to B to A to C and back to A.
These four men, who met as freshers at University College London in 1996, haven’t stopped grafting since.
The music blows hot and cold, with too many tracks from Music Of The Spheres (seven) and not enough from its far stronger predecessor, Everyday Life (one). But Coldplay get away with it because, unlike any other rock band of the 21st Century, they keep on making hit singles. Yellow is stirring, In My Place beguiling, Fix You heartwarming.
When they finally get around to releasing their Greatest Hits, it will stay in the charts for years.
By the end of the evening the atmosphere is less like a children’s party and more like a wedding: everyone but the gendarmes has a smile on their face.
Bruce Springsteen once said that live music was all about communion, and when you go to a Coldplay gig – as he did in
June, joining them on stage in Rutherford, New Jersey – you see exactly what he means.