When Coldplay released their seventh album, A Head Full of Dreams, they decided to play one of their smallest venues in years – St John’s Church at Hackney in London. The 2015 gig showed frontman Chris Martin at his optimistic best, belting out exuberant pop-rock songs with a “heal the world” ethos. Four years later, the band venture into a bleaker landscape on new album Everyday Life, with its lugubrious violins and themes of political and social strife, performed by a more sombre Martin.
Coldplay recently announced they will not tour until their concerts are “actively beneficial to the environment”. It’s slightly jarring, then, to witness Martin, fresh off the plane from a concert in Jordan, singing beneath the blue whale skeleton that hangs in the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum. He misses the opportunity to make a comment about extinction and instead jokes about his management misunderstanding when he said he wanted to perform “near Wales”.
Everyday Life is not Coldplay’s best album, playing more like a collection of fractured, conflicting messages about the state of the world, with instrumentation that twitches nervously between straight-up pop and more dubious “world music” influences. That said, it does contain one or two of their best songs in years. “Orphans” is a rousing experience live; Martin hits the high notes with ease, and the layers of percussion with deeper textures of bass steer the track away from “world music” territory. “Arabesque”, which brings out Femi Kuti and his superb band (who also appear on the album) is fantastic too, and Martin makes a graceful exit to allow for a jamming session, and for Kuti to embark on a stonking saxophone solo.
I’d happily keep Kuti onstage for another few minutes. “Guns” doesn’t work on the album and it doesn’t work live, unless you need a reminder of how painfully clumsy the lyrics are: “Poor is good for business, cut the forests, they’re so dumb/ Only save your lookalikes and f*** the other ones.” Embellishments to the band later on in the night, such as a string section accompanying “Viva La Vida”, add a sense of ceremony after a slightly clumsy start. A moving singalong for “Fix You” reminds me that the band are in fact capable of sincerity without the schmaltz (undone almost immediately by the teeth-rotting “Daddy”). The acoustics in the hall feel perfect for such an event, and for all the doom-and-gloom narrative that Coldplay have crowbarred into the new record, their live performance is as uplifting an experience as ever.
