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

It is, as Chris Martin factors out, 25 years since Coldplay’s Glastonbury debut, a silver anniversary they commemorate tonight by unexpectedly dusting down an acoustic model of Sparks from their debut album Parachutes. Maybe extra pertinently, it’s the fifth time they’ve headlined the pageant, they usually’ve obtained the dangle of it to such an extent that it more and more feels just like the job the quartet had been placed on earth to do.

Since their final look in 2016, they’ve accomplished a 180 diploma flip from earnest stadium balladeers to purveyors of relentless, balls-out, more-is-more visible overload: their gigs at the moment are successfully a Twenty first-century equal of U2’s Zoo TV exhibits, albeit with none of U2’s accompanying theorising concerning the media or the connection between artwork and commerce.

This gig is performed amid the eye-popping, ongoing Music of the Spheres tour, and all the pieces that gave the impression to be cranked as much as 11 once I noticed it two years in the past is now cranked as much as 12. The top outcome makes Dua Lipa’s efficiency on Friday night time appear like the dernier cri in shy understatement.

Pyrotechnics and confetti cannons are used not as a particular impact, however as a daily punctuation level, not deployed to signpost the climax of the present, however the arrival of choruses. Inflatables roll over the gang, whereas equipping the viewers with illuminated wristbands stays the very best thought anybody’s had at a giant-scale gig since they labored out tips on how to flip the massive stage-side screens on: it’s each visually dazzling and dizzily efficient at turning even the fringes of what seems like will probably be the largest crowd of the weekend into a part of the efficiency.

It’s shamelessly unsubtle crowd-pleasing stuff, from the plain singalong anthems that precede their look – Don’t Look Again In Anger, Smells Like Teen Spirit – to a drone flying overhead broadcasting the vastness of the assembled plenty again to them, to the extent of flattery Chris Martin lavishes on the pageant and the viewers itself: “Superb great folks from in every single place… the best metropolis on earth … an important engine room on this planet”.

Nonetheless, in the midst of the gang, it could take a fairly extraordinary stage of churlishness to not be swept alongside in its wake. No matter cheap objections you may lodge in opposition to Coldplay do appear to soften away within the face of such cartoonish good enjoyable – at a pageant the place there’s theoretically all the time one thing else happening to divert your consideration, it’s a sensible thought to repeatedly give the viewers one thing to have a look at – and a set toploaded with a relentless bombardment of biggest hits: Yellow, Clocks, Journey of a Lifetime, The Scientist, Paradise, Viva La Vida, Increased Energy.

Certainly, it’s so relentless that the center part, throughout which they begin rolling out the particular company seems like a respite, just because the songs they’re guesting on are album tracks: Laura Mvula sings Violet Hill from Viva la Vida – intriguingly the solitary genuinely indignant anti-war protest music 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 seem on an impressively highly effective model of Arabesque, the spotlight of 2019’s decidedly combined bag On a regular basis Life.

The ultimate a part of the present often skirts with a barely tacky daffiness because it makes an attempt to seek out additional stops to tug out: Chris Martin will get the cameras to concentrate on particular person viewers members and makes up songs about them on the spot; he invitations the gang en masse to ship out personal messages of affection to the world (the dispatch of mentioned messages is marked with extra fireworks).

However he nonetheless succeeds in carrying the gang with it. For a finale, he unexpectedly brings out Michael J Fox, after which performs Repair You. The latter is arguably probably the most slender of Coldplay’s patented Huge Tunes, nevertheless it feels noticeably bulked up by being sung en masse, to a backdrop of their trademark wristbands glowing a heat orange. Onstage, the cameras briefly concentrate on drummer Will Champion, who, quite sweetly, appears to be moved to tears. However even when it doesn’t go away you moist-eyed, Coldplay’s efficiency is the form of Glastonbury set that nobody current is prone to neglect in a rush.