“You’re never quite sure when you go home how people are going to receive you,” says Chris Martin from Wembley’s stage. It’s the kind of thing that hugely successful rock stars say to get a cheer from a home town crowd, but perhaps there is a hint of disquiet in Coldplay’s world in 2022.
What is, presumably, the most environmentally friendly tour in rock history – energy generated by stationary bikes and a kinetic dancefloor in the audience, a backstage generator that runs on cooking oil, and souvenir T-shirts priced at £45, presumably to discourage needless consumerism – arrives at a peculiar moment in the quartet’s career. A band that commercially could do no wrong for decades, everything they touched turning multiplatinum, their sales have noticeably slumped.
