Perpetual people-pleasers Coldplay have come up with the ultimate Coldplay move for their forthcoming stadium world tour in support of their current album, A Head Full of Dreams. Alongside a rigid setlist of uplifting yet melancholic bluster they’ll also have a requests section, highlighting their sonic shift from indie bedwetter students to Stargate-produced, Beyoncé-collaborating mature students.
While the specifics are still being finessed inside frontman Chris Martin’s mind – likely fighting for space alongside almond milk, cliff-top Bikram yoga and the current state of global fair trading – it seems likely to involve some kind of designated request booth. “I think we want to make it like a passport photobooth, so you go in and say, ‘I am Derek, I would like you to play The Hardest Part,’” he explained to the Sun. “So for example, if we are going to play a song like Spies off Parachutes, it will be lovely to play it and say, ‘This is for Helen from Bolton as this reminds her of her dad.’ That is a bad example and not a real one.”
For a band like Coldplay, this kind of move makes a lot of sense. As a stadium proposition, it’s a neat way of making a gargantuan venue feel slightly more personal, even if it is only pleasing Derek and Helen from Bolton. It helps create that all-important sense of a shared emotional experience among 70,000 people. Perhaps more importantly for the band themselves, it’s a way of dusting off the old songs they’ve performed endlessly, or perhaps have fallen out of love with, and placing them in a new context. As Chris Martin said: “We’re enjoying playing really old songs. This tour will finally have a setlist where we feel good about it from start to finish.”
While this idea of setting up a special song request message centre is fairly unique, pop stars have been canvassing fans for song requests more frequently of late. Kelly Clarkson started using the “KCrequests” hashtag in 2013, asking fans to suggest covers they’d like to hear her tackle; U2 recently brought a fan onstage to help them perform a song he’d requested, while Madonna had a request section as part of her Sticky & Sweet tour, often dismissing songs she didn’t like or couldn’t remember and instead wheeling out the sort of classics you’d imagine Madonna should be playing in the first place (Material Girl, Like A Virgin, Open Your Heart).
It’s people screaming out song titles at unsuspecting pop stars in between songs – what Rolling Stone pinpointed as one of the 10 most annoying things to do at a concert – that Coldplay’s method will at least rule out. Yelled requests lead to a frustrated Tori Amos singing “I’m not a jukebox” at her fans during a gig. A Coldplay-style request section could also help do away with the dreaded, haphazard acoustic segment that has blighted many a pop concert, with this method at least giving the pop act a bit more time to practice a proper version of the song and not just fumble through a verse and a chorus while sitting on a stool.
The rise of request culture also represents an interesting shift in power between the talent and the paying audience, and one that perhaps steps on the toes of pop acts keen to keep their shows as pieces of art rather than an elaborately staged version of Total Request Live (say what you want about Madonna, but her recent Rebel Heart tour managed to walk the line between finely curated spectacle and crowd-pleasing singalong – even if True Blue was knocked out on a ukulele).
In the age of fan-curated playlists of dream setlists, fans not only don’t want to be left disappointed – they also want to feel part of the process in general. In the same way social media makes audiences feel more connected to their musical heroes, this type of behaviour makes that two-way conversation more pronounced. And with record sales in decline and money from ticket sales taking up a larger percentage of artists’ revenue, it’s key that acts keep their fans interested and willing to shell out large amounts of money for tickets to shows not always that dissimilar to the ones wheeled out a few years prior.
However, perhaps the best thing about Coldplay’s song booth idea, with its apparent direct line to the artist themselves, is that it could potentially be opened out to more far-reaching requests – sort of like an off-the-cuff suggestion box for finely tuned, heavily detailed multimillion-dollar tours. Fans could suggest that Martin tone down the tipsy-university-educated-uncle-at-a-wedding dance moves; Madonna fans could politely ask that she leave the guitar playing to someone more qualified; Rihanna fans could beg her to play some of the big bangers now that she’s suddenly become Kanye West; and Justin Bieber fans older than 20 could plead with him to only do songs from Purpose. The possibilities are endless.
