“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.
Last year’s Music of the Spheres was clearly intended to turn things around – shipping in the Swedish super-producer Max Martin, BTS and Selena Gomez – but seemed to succeed only in confusing Coldplay’s traditional audience, particularly in the US. If the intention was to introduce them to a new wave of teenage fans, then judging by the audience at Wembley, it didn’t work.
But as any heritage rock act will tell you, shifting gig tickets and selling new albums are entirely different businesses these days. 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.
They’ve been packing vast sports arenas for 20 years and here at least they know exactly what they’re doing. 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.
Moreover, they’re inventive in their approach. 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. 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.
Indeed, there’s something oddly disarming about seeing Coldplay in their natural habitat. 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.
More unexpectedly, the live setting potentiates the sci-fi conceptualising of Music of the Spheres. 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
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. Perhaps they reverse-engineered that one, but it doesn’t matter: you don’t really feel like nitpicking when you’re being swept along by a genuinely immersive experience.
