“Yesterday morning we were in Jordan,” marvels Chris Martin, hastily strapping on an acoustic guitar. As a statue of Charles Darwin frowns down from the top of the Natural History Museum entrance hall steps, microphone stands are rearranged around Martin and guitarist Jonny Buckland. Cameramen dart about.
Martin usually performs in a tearing hurry. His air of flustered bonhomie lends Coldplay’s stadium shows an air of cultural urgency they might otherwise lack. His manner is more understandable tonight. Coldplay have arrived later than the advertised 10pm. There is a lot to get through – great swaths of a new double album, special guests, a hit or three, and corny jokes about the museum.
“I said, ‘When we launch our album, can we do a gig near Wales’,” Martin offers, as the skeleton of a blue whale looms above. The realisation dawns on the parents of young children here that the reason that Dippy the Diplodocus was evicted from this hall wasn’t because he wanted to go on tour, but because he was in the way. Now they have more floor space for events such as this.
Tonight’s gig, in aid of the environmental charity Client Earth, has required a hectic turnaround. The band’s latest album, Everyday Life, was launched at the weekend with a performance at the citadel in Amman, Jordan, broadcast on YouTube. Two sets were separated by a seriously long drinks interval. Sunrise found the band performing half the record as the dawn broke over a city chosen for being “bang in the middle of the Middle East”, a region where relatively few western rock bands venture.
Sunset, meanwhile, offered up the other half, fading light and a few dozen excitable young Ammanites on backing vocals, in lieu of an audience. Both films featured atmospheric drone-cam shots of Amman, in which women pegged out clothing on rooftops and cars snaked past in the city below: everyday life, but perhaps exotic window dressing too. Due to environmental concerns, this is as live as Everyday Life will get. Coldplay won’t be touring until tours are more sustainable.
If that announcement prompted dismay internationally – with their “oh, woah-oh” choruses, Coldplay export very well – the band don’t exactly have a citadel to climb to please tonight’s hometown crowd. Most bands are far more rewarding up close – tonight is very intimate, by Coldplay standards. And gigs in museums beat those in soulless hangars, even with the band’s trademark light-up wristbands.
Coldplay’s job is made easier, too, by the fact that Everyday Life is one of the more eventful and intriguing albums in their catalogue. One song, Guns, calls for gun control in the US, quite a rarity for a band who usually use non-specific emotional watercolours, even on Politik, their 2002 song about 9/11. Another new album track – Trouble in Town – features grim audio of US police harassment (although that clip isn’t played tonight).
One track has a title given only in Arabic; it features a passage in Igbo and a blessing from spiritual jazz greats John and Alice Coltrane. The start of Èkó recalls west African kora music. Coldplay even go doo-wop.
All this does sound try-hard written down, a little “woke” after the fact. Not far away in west London, Damon Albarn – of Blur, Gorillaz and Africa Express – is probably rolling his eyes at Coldplay’s exciting new dalliance with world music. Somewhere in an Irish keep, Bono is tenting his fingers and chortling at how precisely Coldplay are following U2’s grand gestures yet again.
But these new songs are often persuasive. Played out in this Victorian cathedral to science, this latest iteration of Coldplay – rootsy, open-bordered, a little sweary – gels.
Naturally, some of the new songs, such as Church, remain resolutely true to type. Although Martin opened up about his past religiosity and his current attitudes in a recent interview – God is love, roughly – Church isn’t actually about religion. It finds Martin extolling romantic love as succour.
As for God, free badges are available, with “love” written on them, and four gospel singers add their voices to Broken, an out-and-out gospel tune. It’s worth seeking out the band’s jokey album press conference video, in which Coldplay get all the barbs against themselves in first. “I was wondering if you were familiar with the old quote, ‘when the songs are dire, call the gospel choir’,” snarks Carrie Brownstein, asking questions alongside Fred Armisen.
The backing vocalists come on and off again several times tonight – once, for a particularly mellifluous version of Fix You, the most enduring of their lovelorn ballads, where Martin hands the last part of the song over to their sweet tones.
Like the album, the gig is busy with moving parts. A string section comes and goes. Dressed in a billowing white gown, guest vocalist Norah Shaqur adds an Arabic part to Broken and to the closing title track. These international guests and their cross-genre malleability actually suit Coldplay, the erstwhile fair trade campaigners, far more than the usual vapid cross-branding exercises they undertake.
Most genuinely moving tonight is a track called Arabesque, a song that seems slightly misnamed, as it recalls the desert rock of Tinariwen more than anything north African. The gig becomes fluid and supercharged with rhythm when Femi Kuti, son of Fela, and the horn section from his Positive Force band arrive – and then remain on stage for one of their own tracks.
Orphans, by contrast, tells a story set to the backdrop of the Syrian refugee crisis. The ringing chorus – “I want to know when I can go home and get drunk with my friends” – aims to drive home the point that refugees are just like the rest of us. It slightly misses the point about how Islamic youngsters might choose to party. But as a dose of stadium uplift in miniature, it works just fine.
