O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, LondonChris Martin and co – and Ed Sheeran – keep the festivities local, for now, launching Coldplay’s space-inspired new album in a venue the band last played in 1999
![Coldplay review – stadium poppers take the big-time small scale](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ae40c929f5345399585726a56b708bbbca455549/0_392_7938_4764/master/7938.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctcmV2aWV3LTMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=7d5b8eea39d92278340efd1e6aa8104c)
At the end of Coldplay’s greatest-hits set, Chris Martin’s thanks come in a Babel of languages – Spanish, Japanese; there might be Korean in there too. It’s a reflex that underlines the special circumstances of this one-off gig.
Before the pandemic forced the whole world to stop touring, Coldplay presciently put their own globe-straddling juggernaut up on blocks. In 2019, Martin announced that, until the band could fill arenas from
Belgium to
Venezuela in carbon-neutral
fashion, the jaunts that had turned Coldplay from a successful band of the Anglosphere into a vast global concern had to pause. Having talked the talk of the climate emergency, Coldplay, of all bands, had to not burn the aviation fuel.