“It’s never been harder to come to a gig,” Chris Martin tells a heaving Wembley Stadium five songs into Coldplay’s epic homecoming. “There’s traffic, strikes, (rising) prices, Covid, heatwaves… even if you’re 10 miles away at the back, we’re in the same band. This is our concert.”
Leave your cynicism at the door. This is what Coldplay do, and they didn’t become the biggest band in the world without being able to tap into the mindset of the masses, turning grand events into intimate spaces. It’s now 20 years since second album A Rush of Blood to the Head sent them supernova – “Some of you weren’t even born when this came out,” Martin laughs before “Sparks” from their 2000 debut Parachutes – but their longevity is in part explained by the inclusive spectacle of their live shows.
“Let’s make this a love fest” Martin says during an extended version of “Yellow”, their indelible breakthrough hit, as he asks the front half of the crowd to turn around and sing the song’s refrain to the people at the back. “Look at the stars/ Look how they shine for you,” bellows half of Wembley’s 90,000 crowd as the L.E.D wristbands the crowd were given on entry light up and turn the stadium – you guessed it – yellow.
Alongside tricks from the Stadium Concert Handbook – pyro, balloons, confetti, fireworks, a runway and a B-stage in the middle of the crowd for Martin to do his unashamedly awkward run/dance hybrid – the wristbands elevate the show. It’s a brilliant idea: not only does it make the gig as Instagram friendly as an art installation, but the visual gala of 90,000 lights flashing around Wembley is thrilling. The entire crowd is involved in the show at a stroke, making tonight about more than just songs, but the sense of being part of something bigger.
It might be a strange thing to say about a band who are starting a six-night sold-out residency at the national stadium – this during the band’s groundbreaking carbon-neutral world tour – but it actually hasn’t been the easiest of years for Coldplay. Presumably spooked by the fact 2019’s experimental, understated Everyday Life tanked sales-wise, they decided to take no chances with last year’s ninth album Music of the Spheres: pop producer extraordinaire Max Martin (Britney Spears, Taylor Swift) was enlisted for production duties in an unashamed lunge for the pop market.
Sensing which way the wind was blowing, Coldplay have long since swapped emotive indie-rock for a more modern electronic pop sound: see tonight’s unrelenting house-y “A Sky Full of Stars” and the R&B-flavoured “Hymn for the Weekend”. But the new album’s duets with Selena Gomez and world-conquering K-pop boyband BTS have a slight air of desperation, as if the collaborations were made purely thinking about Spotify streaming stats. It brought about some of the worst reviews of their career.
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The flip side to that is their new material – much of it big and brash – couldn’t be better suited to the vastness of Coldplay’s stadium show. Opener “Higher Power” and “Humankind” are precision tooled synth-pop that show Martin’s way with a melody remains intact; the autotuned ballad “Human Heart”, with the stadium lit up in giant red hearts, is the sort of thing only Coldplay could get away with on this scale; with its soaring synths, that BTS collaboration “My Universe”, with the Korean band featured on the big screens, is actually the poppiest they’ve ever sounded, which is saying something. It gets one of the most ecstatic reactions of the night.
Even continuing the album’s slightly muddled concept of music from another galaxy doesn’t derail things: there are two duets with The Weirdos, an alien band featuring the singer Angel Moon, a puppet creation by Jim Henson (no, really); during the ravey hedonism (by Coldplay’s standards) of “The Lightclub”, the band take to wearing alien helmets in a rather bizarre yet fun display.
All the while, Martin is in full everyday showman mode, a beaming, running, jumping, kinetic ball of energy and gratitude, his voice as strong as ever on the night’s most moving moment, “The Scientist”. You either go in for Martin’s charismatic brand of earnest affability or you don’t, but like Coldplay themselves, if you suddenly let the cliches wash over you, even the simplest of gestures can take on significant meaning. When Martin asks us, just for once, not to record on our phones during the finale to closer “A Sky Full of Stars” – “no cell phones, just people, heart and soul” – it feels like a profound statement of connection. Everyone adheres.
They bring Craig David out for the encore – “We used to be jealous that for every one record we sold, he sold 100”– to sing stripped back versions of David’s “Live in the Moment” and “Fill Me In” on a C-stage at the opposite end of the stadium. It’s the one unexpected moment in a two-hour set that was Coldplay doing exactly what they do – and nobody does it better.