Coldplay at Glastonbury review – Chris Martin takes tens of thousands on the adventure of a lifetime | Glastonbury 2024

Iit is, as Chris Martin points out, 25 years since Coldplay’s Glastonbury debut, a silver anniversary they are marking tonight by unexpectedly performing an acoustic version of Sparks from their debut album Parachutes. Perhaps more fittingly, this is the fifth time they’ve headlined the festival, and they’ve nailed it to such an extent that it increasingly feels like the job the quartet was put on earth to do .

Since their last appearance in 2016, they’ve made a 180-degree turn from heartfelt stadium balladeers to purveyors of relentless, helpless, more-is-more visual overload: their concerts are now the 21st-century equivalent of Zoo TV’s U2 shows , albeit without any of U2’s accompanying theories about media or the relationship between art and commerce.

This concert is playing against the backdrop of the impressive, ongoing Music of the Spheres tour, and everything that seemed turned up to 11 when I saw it two years ago is now turned up to 12. The end result makes Dua Lipa’s performance on Friday night seem like dernier cri in shy understatement.

Pyrotechnics and confetti cannons are used not as a special effect, but as a common punctuation point, placed not to mark the climax of the show, but the arrival of choruses. Inflatables roll over the crowd, while outfitting the audience with light-up wristbands remains the best idea anyone has had at a concert on a gigantic scale since they figured out how to turn on the big screens at the side of the stage: it’s both visually dazzling and dizzyingly effective at turning even the fringes of what looks to be the biggest crowd of the weekend into part of the performance.

It’s unashamedly unsubtle crowd-pleasing stuff, from the obvious sing-along anthems that precede their appearance – Don’t Look Back In Anger, Smells Like Teen Spirit – to a drone flying overhead, beaming the vastness of the assembled masses back at them , to the level of flattery. Chris Martin gushes about the festival and the audience itself: “Incredibly wonderful people from all over… the greatest city on earth… the most important engine room in the world.”

Still, in the middle of a crowd, it would have taken a rather extraordinary level of rudeness to avoid being swept away. Whatever reasonable objections you might have against Coldplay seem to melt away in the face of such cartoonishly good fun – at a festival where there’s theoretically always something else to distract you, it’s a smart idea to constantly give the crowd something to look at – and a set loaded with a relentless bombardment of greatest hits: Yellow, Clocks, Adventure of a Lifetime, The Scientist, Paradise, Viva La Vida, Higher Power.

Indeed, it’s so relentless that the middle section, during which they begin to introduce the special guests, feels like a break, simply because the songs they’re guesting on are album tracks: Laura Mvula sings Violet Hill from Viva la Vida – the intriguingly lonely a genuinely angry anti-war protest song in Coldplay’s catalog – Little Sims raps And So We Pray from the forthcoming Moon Music, and Femi Kuti and Palestinian/Chilean singer Elyanna appear on an impressively strong version of Arabesque, the highlight of 2019’s decidedly mixed Everyday Life.

The latter part of the show is occasionally skirted by slightly unpleasant stuffiness as it tries to find extra stops to pull off: Chris Martin has the cameras focus on individual audience members and makes up songs for them on the spot; he invites the crowd to send personal messages of love to the world en masse (the sending of said messages is marked by more fireworks).

But he still manages to take the crowd with him. For the final, he unexpectedly brings out Michael J. Foxand then runs Fix You. The latter is perhaps the thinnest of Coldplay’s patented Big Tunes, but it feels noticeably bigger than being mass-sung, against the backdrop of their trademark wrists glowing a warm orange. On stage, the cameras briefly focus on drummer Will Champion, who, rather cutely, looks moved to tears. But even if it doesn’t leave you with moist eyes, Coldplay’s performance is the kind of Glastonbury no one in attendance will forget in a hurry.