“If you’ve just embezzled the company funds, you’re fine,” Chris Martin told the last of ten Wembley Stadium crowds, with a certain no-fudges-left-to-give humour, as their notorious kisscam scoured the crowd for its final victims – for now. “Get on the camera,” he cajoled, “Everything that happens here stays here. Guaranteed.”
It seemed bizarre to watch a show by Martin’s none-more-cuddly pop rock figureheads with one eye out for scandal. But, with its extramarital exposes and last week’s badly fumbled attempts to Coldplay away the booing of Israeli fans, the Twitterstorm impact of the Music of the Spheres tour has often overshadowed its many records and achievements: ten million trees planted; $1 billion grossed; the most attended, planet-friendly and crowd-brightening tour in history.
As the E.T. flying theme blared out, searchlights strafed the stands and Martin kissed his cosmic-patterned stage like a psychedelic pop Pope, though, the only shock of this closing night of the tour’s first, three-year leg – its week of tube strike delay spent guzzling steroids to make the show better, Martin swears - was to the retina. Within the first seconds of the Top Gun-worthy “Higher Power” the air was confetti, the sky mostly firework, the stadium a vast dot matrix screen of 90,000 wristbands lit up in sweeping, twinkling reds, greens and inevitable yellows, and Coldplay still the most dazzling and joy-inducing spectacle in (self-styled “soft”) rock.
They achieved with their gigantic wristband Pollocks what generations of big-gig acts have long strived for with their lighters, inflatables, flying horseshoe thrones and dee-da-day-os: to shatter the glass observation wall between audience and artist and make an entire stadium feel like an intrinsic part of the show. To watch them play “Yellow” was to become Venusian barley; the glory pop experience of “Charlie Brown” – the dictionary definition of effervescent – was that of a bubble in an ocean of cola, into which has been dropped a moon sized Mento.
Martin, bedecked with cosmic symbols and wearing the same mottled blue t-shirt that’s seen him through 233 gigs since 2022, wasn’t so much a focal star as an avatar for our inner children. There he went, bless him, racing through the balloon clouds of a space disco “Adventures of a Lifetime”, riverdancing in an alien head for the ravey “Something Just Like This” and aeroplaning along an ego ramp full of bouncing string players at the euphoric climax of “Viva la Vida”, the victory chant of some future revolution.
In quieter moments he was a charmingly unifying presence. He did with the feels of break-up ballad “The Scientist” what the wristbands had done for “Paradise”, and invited tearful devotees onto the ramp-end mini-stage for a rare acoustic jig through Pride-friendly ditty “JUPiTER” – “the gayest thing we’ve ever done at our concerts”, morphing with the help of the soulful Pink Singers troupe into an impromptu cover of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)”. His infamous “Jumbotron Song” – improvising short folk verses about crowd-members - spotlit only birthday boys, pre-teen first-timers and a sound engineer dressed as an inflatable tube man and, after a stripped down and jazzy take on early track “Sparks” on a tiny stage far out in the crowd, he presented guitarist Johnny Buckland with flowers, a WH Smiths voucher and a Lego Batmobile for his birthday, making all of Wembley feel part of a rehearsal room whip round.
Coldplay’s embrace of the pop mainstream on recent albums such as Music of the Spheres and last year’s Moon Music made the show’s latter half a scattergun affair. The class, quality and power of “Clocks” and “Fix You” undoubtedly stood out amidst the more lightweight K-pop hits (“My Universe”), gospel rap tunes (“WE PRAY”, with guests Shone and Elyanna adding a Baltic Eurovision vibe) and Balearic dance segments, complete with a comedy raving security guard.
But what linked and lifted it all was an overarching message of togetherness, respect and understanding in an age flunking badly on such fronts. Martin whipping around a neon LGBTQ+ flag in the name of sexual uprising on the Muse-like, glam metal “People of the Pride”. The Moon Goggle glasses which turned the stadium’s lights and fireworks into rainbow hearts for “feelslikeimfallinginlove”; the sea of cardboard lovehearts raised during the stirring closing singalong “ALL MY LOVE”.
Or the mid-gig time out for the crowd to “send love” to anywhere in the world that needs it, “You can send it to the families of people who’ve been going through terrible stuff. You can send it to Charlie Kirk’s family. You can send it to anybody’s family. You can send it to people you disagree with but you send them love anyway.”
The sole scandal of the evening was Martin’s announcement that it will be 18 months before this magnificent, life-affirming tour resumes “somewhere in Southern Africa”. “Thank you for giving us this mini-utopia in a world that can be weird at times,” he said and, until 2027, you’d be forgiven for wanting to live full-time in their storage warehouse.
