Gentle eco-warriors with a Southwestern humour: Coldplay and Glastonbury were made for each other
On Saturday, Coldplay will be one of the acts to headline Live At Worthy Farm tonight, the five-hour virtual Glastonbury Festival laid on to compensate for the actual event’s cancellation for the second year running. Recorded on the Eavis family’s Somerset farm where the festival has taken place on and off since 1970, Live At Worthy Farm will see performers play Covid-friendly audience-free sets from various locations around the site, from the skeleton of the Pyramid Stage to the Stone Circle.
It will be the fifth time that Coldplay have headlined Glastonbury, albeit in altered circumstances. Their appearance makes Chris, Jonny, Guy and Will the festival’s most prolific headliners of all time and nudges them ahead of The Cure and Elvis Costello, who have taken the honours four times apiece. (The boys actually play at 9pm on Saturday between Haim and Damon Albarn but they’re clearly the headline act, along with a special guest rumoured to be a certain Brit Award-winning American songstress).
Coldplay’s set will no doubt be the usual hit-packed and inventive celebration. It will also ram home just how hugely intertwined the Coldplay and Glastonbury brands have become. Since the band first headlined in 2002, their festival appearances have acted as staging posts in their career. But, as the years have passed, a sort of creative symbiosis has meshed Glastonbury and Coldplay together; a shared cultural latticework has emerged that, two decades on, renders their values and aesthetics almost indistinguishable.
Like a West Country reimagining of the Medicis and Michelangelo, Glastonbury’s patronage of Coldplay – and Coldplay’s regular eye-popping performances on the Pyramid Stage – have helped grow both entities into mighty global forces. The similarities are striking. Both are inclusive and internationalist, they espouse positivity, and they have a vaguely cosmic edge. They both revel in detail, they’re musical genre-hoppers, and they major on technicolour spectacle. They care about the environment, they encourage activism, and they wear their corporateness lightly. They share a gentle South-Western humour (Chris Martin is from Devon), they have an underplayed but very present celebrity aura, and neither of them are likely to scare the horses.
I don’t know anything about ‘brand alignment’, as I suspect this is called. But James Murphy does. He is the award-winning man behind those John Lewis Christmas ads and, according to Campaign magazine, an undisputed superstar of 21st-century British advertising; last year, he co-founded a new agency called New Commercial Arts. So I ask him why he thinks these two worlds of Coldplay and Glastonbury dovetail so neatly.
“[They] are both giants of popular culture. They also both have indie alternative roots and they very quickly moved beyond those. And they’ve both perfected their model of delivering large-scale and euphoric musical moments. That’s why they fit together so well,” says Murphy.
There are, of course, detractors. People sneer at how Coldplay have almost become Glastonbury’s house band. And the BBC audience of millions automatically gifted to headliners in normal times may seem inequitable to the deserving entertainers further down the bill. But the Glastonbury-Coldplay alliance shows no sign of stopping. To many, it remains a marriage made in heaven, so long – of course – as the marriage is a carbon-neutral humanist one and heaven is a daisy-festooned maypole in a corner of the Healing Field.
So how did it all come about?
The truth is that back in 2000, Glastonbury and Coldplay needed each other. At that summer’s festival – the Bowie year – a paying crowd of 100,000 was swollen to 250,000 by fence-jumpers. The place was dangerously overrun. When nine people were killed during a crush at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark the following week, the issue of festival safety came to the fore. (It had been a tricky decade for Glastonbury anyway, marred by riots, biblical mud and a fire that destroyed the Pyramid Stage). So Eavis cancelled the 2001 festival due to security fears. For it to reopen in 2002, he needed safety and professionalism. So he built a ￡1 million super-fence and booked Coldplay to headline.
From the band’s point of view, they needed a platform. In 2000, with their debut album Parachutes still two weeks from being released, they’d played their Jeff Buckley-meets-Radiohead-via-Travis indie rock in the middle of the Saturday afternoon on the then-NME (now Other) Stage, between David Gray and Toploader. They were mid-rankers. What happened next amounts to possibly the biggest hoick up of a band in pop music history.
You can blame The Strokes. In September 2000 the New York garage rockers pulled out from headlining the Pilton Party, the small annual shindig that the Eavises put on to thank locals for their forbearance for that year’s festival. Emily Eavis suggested that her father telephone Martin. So he did. As Eavis recalled last year: “I said ‘Chris, I’m so embarrassed but we’re stuck for a headliner on Friday.’ So he said, ‘Which Friday?’ and I said, ‘This Friday, the day after tomorrow.’” The band were playing in Paris that day but Martin and guitarist Jonny Buckland flew over and headlined.
The hop across the Channel was certainly worthwhile. “I said, ‘For this, Chris, you can headline the festival next year. Seriously – you will headline next year. I am pleading with you to do it,’” Eavis said [it was actually in 2002 as things worked out]. Martin remembers that Pilton Party well. He has recalled asking Eavis who’d be headlining the next Glastonbury proper. Eavis replied: “We thought you’d do the Friday.” Martin was so shocked that he “nearly dropped [his] Smarties”.
For many at Glastonbury 2002, it seemed premature for a group of promising indie kids to headline before they’d even released their second album. Indeed, after he’d made his offer, Eavis said Coldplay’s agent and management phoned to say the band weren’t “quite ready”. But the organiser insisted they’d be perfect. And the doubters (this writer included) were proven wrong: Coldplay delivered a muscular set that – crucially – connected with the crowd. Their warmth seemed to fit the rebooted Glastonbury for the new millennium. That year’s vibe was less edgy and kinder; it was less hardcore and scuzzy, more embracing and fuzzy. Had it lost a frisson of danger in the process? Possibly. But were you less likely to have your boots nicked off your feet as you slept? Definitely.
Coldplay returned to headline in 2005, 2011, 2016 and, now, 2021. The Pyramid Stage has acted as a metaphorical height chart: they’ve grown each time. If 2002 represented reasonably tentative beginnings, Martin completely won over the crowd in the mud bath year of 2005 by changing the lyrics of Politik to: “Give me weather that does no harm/ Michael Eavis, Worthy Farm/ Give me mud up to my knees/ The best festival in history.” In 2011 the band projected rainbow lights onto the exterior shell of the Pyramid, and in 2016 a crowd of 100,000-plus wore the band’s flashing wristbands and turned the entire site into a neon disco. “He’s never looked back since that [2002] gig, has he?” Eavis said of Martin last year. The lack of crowds this year gifts the band some intriguing artistic possibilities in terms of staging.
Martin has even become an unofficial agent for Glastonbury. One contact tells me the singer helped talk Jay-Z out of withdrawing from the 2008 festival after a backlash against a hip-hop headliner. And according to Emily Eavis, Martin convinced Beyoncé to headline in 2011 after the singer feared she’d receive similar fallout to her husband. Martin will “do anything for Glastonbury,” Eavis has said.
Coldplay’s music helps. They specialise in positivity pop and ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ ballads, both of which are tailor-made for festival singalongs. In the former camp (cue confetti explosions) sit A Sky Full of Stars and Every Teardrop is a Waterfall, while in the latter camp (cue wristbands aloft) sit Yellow, Fix You and Don’t Panic (although Don’t Pan-dem-ic may be more appropriate this year).
I often wonder if Coldplay deliberately write their music with Glastonbury in mind. The songs have certainly got bigger and broader in their appeal as the years have progressed. Just like the festival. It’s what Murphy means when he talks about “alternative roots”. “What’s interesting is that Glastonbury was actually an alternative event for a very short period of its existence when you look at it over a timeline. And Coldplay were an alternative entity for a very short period of their existence. They began being thoughtful and slightly shoe-gazing but the epic anthems burst out and they couldn’t help themselves,” Murphy says.
The band seem as aware of overkill as others. Martin said he was hurt by some of the comments after his 2019 guest appearances. It was one of the reasons the band ruled themselves out from headlining in 2020 (before the event was cancelled).
So Coldplay must be used sparingly. Their ubiquity mustn’t rob opportunity from potential prospective headliners. Let’s put to one side the established global titans who’ve yet to headline (hello Lady Gaga, AC/DC, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John and Nick Cave). There’s a pipeline of other acts who tick the Big Songs and Broad Appeal boxes and would relish the opportunity to add Massive Spectacle as future bill-toppers. Wolf Alice, Dua Lipa and Dave are contenders. Billie Eilish or Vampire Weekend too. My colleague Neil McCormick reckons Fontaines D.C. are Glastonbury headliners in the making. They just need the hoick up that Coldplay got in 2002.
The future of the festival kind of depends on it. But in the meantime, sit back and watch the Pyramid veterans at work. They know what they’re doing. Crowd or no crowd, euphoric musical moments are guaranteed.
