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Coldplay at Glastonbury review – Chris Martin takes tens of thousands on the adventure of a lifetime
Fireworks! Lasers! Confetti! More fireworks! Coldplay pull out every last stop for their record fifth headline performance, and you’d be churlish not to love it
Since their last appearance in 2016, they’ve completed a 180 degree turn from earnest stadium balladeers to purveyors of relentless, balls-out, more-is-more visual overload: their gigs are now effectively a 21st-century equivalent of U2’s Zoo TV shows, albeit without any of U2’s accompanying theorising about the media or the relationship between art and commerce. Whatever reasonable objections you might lodge against Coldplay do seem to melt away in the face of such cartoonish good fun – at a festival where there’s theoretically always something else going on to divert your attention, it’s a smart idea to continually give the audience something to look at – and a set toploaded with a relentless bombardment of greatest hits: Yellow, Clocks, Adventure of a Lifetime, The Scientist, Paradise, Viva La Vida, Higher Power. Photograph: David Levene/The GuardianIndeed, it’s so relentless that the middle section, during which they start rolling out the special guests feels like a respite, simply because the songs they’re guesting on are album tracks: Laura Mvula sings Violet Hill from Viva la Vida – intriguingly the solitary genuinely angry anti-war protest song in Coldplay’s catalogue – Little Simz raps on And So We Pray, from the forthcoming Moon Music, and Femi Kuti and Palestinian/Chilean singer Elyanna appear on an impressively powerful version of Arabesque, the highlight of 2019’s decidedly mixed bag Everyday Life.
Or read this on The Guardian
