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
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.