In fact, you find yourself wondering if Music of the Spheres’ land-grab for a teen pop audience will work: Coldplay’s history suggests it will – but in its own way it’s far more risky than its predecessor’s dabblings in global music.
Certainly The Scientist has a genuine emotional heft that the diet-EDM of A Sky Full of Stars, or Music of the Spheres’ Auto-Tune-assisted Human Heart (which tonight comes with a guest vocal from Fleur East) do not. If you thought their early Noughties releases dealt in windy generalities, they sound almost painfully acute and incisive next to the later stuff. For all the accusations of beige-ness hurled their way, they’ve subtly but deftly navigated changing fashions – although you occasionally wonder at the cost. It’s a bullish reminder of how Coldplay got, and then stayed, huge. Everything else they play is a single that achieved such ubiquity you’d immediately recognise it even if you had spent the last 20 years going out of your way to avoid Coldplay: Clocks, Viva La Vida, Paradise, Yellow. The setlist is similarly constructed: there are five songs from the forthcoming album, but its main business is clobbering you into submission. ‘Some actual hits’ … Chris Martin and Jonny Buckland of Coldplay with Ed Sheeran. The gig’s idea of restraint involves waiting until song three to bring out one of the biggest pop stars in the world: Ed Sheeran, who duets on Fix You, returning later to play three of his own songs (“Some actual big hits,” smiles Martin). The keys on Chris Martin’s piano light up as he plays, while the singer’s extravagant stage movements are visibly designed to reach Row ZZ of the Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland. There are confetti cannons and a surfeit of lasers. There are projections not just on the stage but all over the inside of the venue. And so it proves: Coldplay appear to have crammed their entire arena production into a 2,000-capacity theatre. You get the sense, even before you get inside the auditorium, that this is probably not the path that Coldplay have chosen to take: there are attendants in the lobby handing out the flashing wristbands Chris Martin and co use to create impressive lighting effects in vast crowds. One is to strip things down to their understated essence and allow the audience a rare glimpse into the artist au naturel. When a band as big as Coldplay perform a relatively intimate show, they have two basic options. The showcase gigs, meanwhile, have taken place in New York, Paris, Berlin and London – albeit at venues that are doubtless smaller than the backstage areas of the kind of enormodomes the band have long called home. Its arrival was heralded by the band literally sending their music into space: lead single Higher Power received its premiere beamed from the International Space Station. Its follow-up, however, features K-pop boyband BTS and Selena Gomez among its supporting cast (collaborators, Chris Martin appears to suggest from the stage tonight, who were suggested by actor Simon Pegg’s 12-year-old daughter) and was produced by Max Martin, the most celebrated of pop’s shadowy super-producers and the co-author of 25 US No 1 singles. Its showcase gig featured the album played in its entirety, in Jordan, without an audience. The experimental double album Everyday Life, from 2019, was announced with typewritten messages sent to fans and classified ads placed in local newspapers. T he promotion of Coldplay’s forthcoming album offers a study in contrasts with that of its predecessor.