Pyramid stage
“CHRIS MARTIN” Booms and whistles! Lasers! Sprinkles! Extra fireworks! You would be churlish not to adore Coldplay’s record-breaking fifth headline performance, as they pull out all the stops.
As Chris Martin notes, Coldplay made their Glastonbury debut 25 years ago. To celebrate this milestone, they will unintentionally perform Sparks, an acoustic rendition from their debut album Parachutes, tonight. More importantly, this is the quartet’s sixth time as the festival’s headliners, and they’ve gotten so good at it that it feels more and more like the mission they were sent to do.
They’ve gone from being earnest stadium balladeers to being purveyors of relentless, balls-out, more-is-more visual overload since their last appearance in 2016. Their concerts are essentially the 21st-century equivalent of U2’s Zoo TV shows, minus any of the band’s accompanying theorizing about the media or the relationship between art and commerce.
Everything that seemed to be turned up to eleven when I saw it two years ago is now turned up to twelve at this performance, which is taking place in the middle of the staggering, continuous Music of the Spheres tour. The final product gives the impression that Dua Lipa’s Friday night performance was the epitome of modest understatement.
Instead than being employed as a spectacular effect, fireworks and confetti cannons are frequently used to signal the approach of choruses rather than the show’s conclusion. While inflatables roll over the crowd, the best idea anyone has had for a massively immersive performance is to arm the audience with illuminated wristbands. This is because the wristbands look amazing and work incredibly well at drawing attention to even the edges of the crowd, which appears to be the largest of the weekend.
From the obvious sing-along hits that precede their appearance—Don’t Look Back in Anger, Smells Like Teen Spirit—to the level of flattery Chris Martin bestows on the festival and the audience, saying things like “Amazing wonderful people from all over the place… the greatest city on earth… the most important engine room in the world,” there is nothing subtly subtle about this crowd-pleasing material.
However, in the midst of the throng, it would need an exceptionally high degree of impoliteness to avoid being carried away by it. Any valid criticism of Coldplay does seem to be overshadowed by such cartoonishly good times; at a festival where there’s presumably always something else going on to keep you occupied, it makes sense to constantly provide the audience with something to look at, and their set is jam-packed with their greatest hits. Yellow, Clocks, Adventure of a Lifetime, The Scientist, Paradise, Viva La Vida, Higher Power.
Indeed, it’s so relentless that the middle section, during which they start rolling out the special guests feels like a respite, simply because the songs they’re guesting on are album tracks: Laura Mvula sings Violet Hill from Viva la Vida – intriguingly the solitary genuinely angry anti-war protest song in Coldplay’s catalogue – Little Simz raps on And So We Pray, from the forthcoming Moon Music, and Femi Kuti and Palestinian/Chilean singer Elyanna appear on an impressively powerful version of Arabesque, the highlight of 2019’s decidedly mixed bag Everyday Life.
The final part of the show occasionally skirts with a slightly cheesy daffiness as it attempts to find further stops to pull out: Chris Martin gets the cameras to focus on individual audience members and makes up songs about them on the spot; he invites the crowd en masse to send out private messages of love to the world (the dispatch of said messages is marked with more fireworks).
But he still succeeds in carrying the crowd with it. For a finale, he unexpectedly brings out Michael J Fox, and then performs Fix You. The latter is arguably the most slender of Coldplay’s patented Big Tunes, but it feels noticeably bulked up by being sung en masse, to a backdrop of their trademark wristbands glowing a warm orange. Onstage, the cameras briefly focus on drummer Will Champion, who, rather sweetly, seems to be moved to tears. But even if it doesn’t leave you moist-eyed, Coldplay’s performance is the kind of Glastonbury set that no one present is likely to forget in a hurry.
