Culture | Music If there’s one thing Coldplay know how to do, it’s craft a stadium banger. Viva La Vida. Clocks.
The Stranger. They’re all grandiose masterpieces, designed to be sung along to at full pelt. Or howled, depending on your state of inebriation.
So on that basis, they’re the perfect candidate to headline Glastonbury (in fact, this is their fifth turn in twenty years, setting a new record). And what better crowd is there than a field of roughly 100,000 light-up wristband wearing revellers, ready and waiting to sing along to all of the hits? What unfolded was not two hours of wall to wall stadium bangers. Instead, it was a very uneven two hours in which the classics gave way to impassioned monologues, improvised ditties and a lot of entreaties for peace and love.
Did it land? That depends on how much you like Coldplay. It started so well. The first song out of the gates was Yellow, which lit up the Pyramid Stage and the crowd’s LED wristbands in bright gold.
It was followed in quick succession by Higher Power, Adventure of a Lifetime and Paradise. Then came Clocks, followed by Hymn for the Weekend (for which Rihanna, sadly, was not present). The first hour closed with a soaring rendition of Viva La Vida that had arms reaching for the sky, and those wristbands twinkling like a field of stars.
So far, so good – but then things started to go off piste. Martin brought a certain zany screwball energy to the proceedings, gallivanting around stage, abd stopping .