Twenty-two years on from the release of Yellow, and Coldplay remain the band you might think it’s not okay to like… until you see them live. Coldplay are – and have been for over a decade now – as good as it gets in a stadium: a startling technicolour spectacle that even the most stone-heartedly cynical hater would find impossible to resist.
The LED wristbands – each member of the audience is given one on their way in, turning the crowd into a giant, wildly oscillating light show – stunned from the outset. Add in confetti cannons, fire, cartoon masks, Chris Martin endlessly galloping, grinning up and down the runway, and it barely even matters which songs you are hearing. They played most songs from last album Music Of The Spheres – opening with the great Higher Power – and it still felt like a hits-only affair.
Coldplay, of course, have hits – as well as a burning desire to please – and we got all of them. Latter day songs Paradise, Viva La Vida and Something Just Like This, with their endless “Ooooooh-ohhh-oooohs”, were custom tooled with six nights at Wembley in mind. The older likes of The Scientist and Sparks – the latter performed on a tiny stage in the centre of the crowd – as well as a stripped-down duet with support act H.E.R. on Let Somebody Go (the one on the new album that features Selena Gomez) brought a sense of intimacy amongst all the bombast.
By the time they brought out Craig David to first kill the mood by singing one of his newer songs that nobody knew, then rescuing proceedings with Seven Days, every soul in Wembley was beaming from ear to ear. Self deprecating to the last, Chris Martin made his way through an ad hoc verse that went: “Met this girl on Monday, she didn’t want to know me on Tuesday. Went off with somebody else on Wednesday, I was on my own on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Went to the cinema alone on Sunday.”
There was a third guest, too, that nobody really noticed: notoriously reclusive mega-producer Max Martin – basically responsible for every big song by anyone in the past 30 years, from Baby One More Time to Blinding Lights – snuck onstage to bang a tamborine on My Universe: the song on which he brought Coldplay together with BTS.
Fix You should really have ended the show, but Coldplay decided instead to climax with recent single Biutyful, complete with the puppets from the video. And it’s perhaps testament to the sheer likeabilty of this band that few were scarpering for the exits while they did.
Wembley Stadium until August 21; wembleystadium.com
