Coldplay, review: Ed Sheeran joins the stadium titans for a rousing, intimate homecoming
There was a moment during this intimate Coldplay comeback gig at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire when, but for the screaming, you would have heard 2,000 jaws hit the floor. Three songs in, one of the biggest bands in the world brought out Ed Sheeran, one of the biggest solo artists in the world. Both have new albums out this month – and along with Adele and ABBA, both are set to give the global music industry the massive fillip it needs this Christmas after a desolate 20 months.
Sheeran plays Wembley Stadium five times next summer and Coldplay – clearly battle-ready and raring to go – must surely be plotting a vast tour of their own. Yet here they were, in the music-venue equivalent of your front room. As they played each other’s hits – including Fix You and Shape of You – the crowd went predictably bonkers, sustained and bolstered by the usual Coldplay concert paraphernalia of lasers, confetti and flashing wristbands.
This spectacle was something of a homecoming for Coldplay. Introducing the band, actor Simon Pegg said that after they’d played the Empire on their formative Parachutes tour in 2000 he’d walked to a cashpoint machine with a young Chris Martin. Martin shared with Pegg his concern that Coldplay may never transcend a venue of this size.
Twenty-one years and 100 million album sales later, Martin needn’t have worried. Coldplay have earned their place at the top of the music tree, as their dizzying setlist of hits at the show attested. An early run of songs included Clocks, the aforementioned Fix You, Viva La Vida, The Scientist and Paradise. Stadium-ready bangers, all.
As Martin leapt around, he and bandmates Will Champion (surely one of the hardest-working drummers in rock), guitarist Jonny Buckland and bassist Guy Berryman exchanged the grins of people getting back to what they do best: playing live. (However, Martin appeared to briefly rap on Adventure of a Lifetime. English public schoolboys should never, ever rap – it should be enshrined in law.)
The band’s aesthetic continues to slowly evolve. Over the years, Coldplay’s look has morphed from skinny indie kids to chorus members of Les Misérables to global hypercolour eco-warriers via musicians in a sepia-tinged 1919 jazz band. To this, they’ve added a cosmic edge to tie in with their new album, Music of the Spheres. They played within a circle of floor lights while stars swirled overhead. It was a heady confection: the vibe seemed to be Victor Hugo having a fight with Isaac Asimov in a Dulux paint factory. But the sensory pounding worked.
It was with some of the new Music of the Spheres material that I had a problem. Human Heart, sung with former X Factor contestant Fleur East and RnB duo We Are KING, was a beautiful slow hymnal while People of the Pride thrillingly combined the glam rock stomp of Spirit in the Sky with the post-apocalyptic dread of The The. Yet much of Coldplay’s new music sees them very deliberately – and slightly clunkily – lurching for a younger pop demographic.
Perhaps this move is inevitable after 2019’s experimental double album Everyday Life. But the recent single Higher Power sounds like a rerun of Don Henley’s Boys of Summer minus the balmy nostalgia, and their collaboration with globe-straddling K-pop boy band BTS – called My Universe – is the blandest song Coldplay have done in a while. Martin’s 12-year-old god-daughter Tilly – Pegg’s daughter – got him into BTS. But on Tuesday night My Universe was like flavourless soup amid a sumptuous feast. (BTS weren’t there. West London would literally have shut down.)
These tracks aside, this was a concert rammed with some of the biggest hits of the past two decades. On the journey home, I counted: the 15 songs played have been streamed almost 10 billion times on Spotify alone. That’s more than there are people on the planet. Cosmic, indeed.
Coldplay are back. And the commercial end of the music industry is in very safe hands.