![]() ![]() The slogan “Everyone is an alien somewhere” keeps cropping up – it’s emblazoned across guitarist Jonny Buckland’s T-shirt, which seems to suggest a link to the argument about immigration, something you would have remained completely oblivious of while listening to the album. Martin sings Human Heart as a duet with an immense female extraterrestrial puppet, before the band perform Something Just Like This wearing giant illuminated alien heads, which makes the whole business seem funnier and more tongue-in-cheek than it did on record More unexpectedly, the live setting potentiates the sci-fi conceptualising of Music of the Spheres. They just bombard you with hits – Clocks, Paradise, Adventure of a Lifetime, Hymn for the Weekend – and eye-popping spectacle, until any objections you may reasonably raise melt away amid the lights, pyrotechnics and confetti cannon, all cranked up to 11, and the sound of tens of thousands of voices singing along to Viva la Vida. Indeed, there’s something oddly disarming about seeing Coldplay in their natural habitat. ![]() Photograph: David Fisher/Rex/Shutterstock ![]() Stunning … handing out LED wristbands cleverly made the audience part of the show. Turning big crowds into an immense, twinkling, ever-changing light show and making the audience part of the performance in the process, the effect is genuinely stunning. Handing out LED-equipped wristbands to the audience is the best idea a stadium rock band has had since playing four songs from your new album in a row and giving less committed fans time to visit the lavatory. Moreover, they’re inventive in their approach. Chris Martin is pretty craven in his approach to milking the audience – teasing the crowd by prefacing The Scientist with a long, florid piano intro encouraging them not just to sing along to Yellow, but to turn around and sing it to each other – but in fairness, subtlety gets you nowhere in the stadium rock game, something Coldplay clearly understand. They’ve been packing vast sports arenas for 20 years and here at least they know exactly what they’re doing. And if Coldplay have frequently seemed rattled in the studio in recent years, unsure of what to do next – Go extremely pop? Experiment with Malian music and doo-wop? Make a space-themed concept album and unleash their inner Pink Floyd? – then live they seem utterly assured. Photograph: David Fisher/Rex/Shutterstockīut as any heritage rock act will tell you, shifting gig tickets and selling new albums are entirely different businesses these days. Oddly disarming … Coldplay in their natural habitat, the stadium. ![]()
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