I've told this story over and over about Coldplay's gig at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in 2005. Having recently watched their latest Glastonbury performance on TV I've had various Anthemic Coldplay-emic songs in my head. Rational folk might want to tell me it's because they're good tunes, but I know it's the Universe's way of telling me to finally write about Coldplay and the “Woodstock of not belonging”. Talk about, how do you write anything? Well, I wait until I get some sort of ear worm of a song in my head, try and ignore it, until finally concluding that I NEED to write about these ideas that I don’t know what else to do with. They don't teach you that in school.

The whole Coldplay thing bugs me. I wanted to say Coldplay journey, or story arc, or Odyssey, or trajectory, but nothing seemed right. Let's just call it the Coldplay thing.

Coldplay came about at a time when MTV, VH1 and M2 would have been constantly playing on my TV. Music videos were still a big deal. When I think about it, those channels would all have played the video to the first Coldplay single. MTV, before it forgot that the 'M' stood for 'Music' and turned into a reality TV network, was your standard channel for popular music with all genres covered. VH1 was often joked of as the channel you go to when you're too old for MTV. VH1 was middle of the road long before that term would get hashtagged into MOR. And M2, later to be renamed MTV2, seemingly came straight out of the minds of those who believed that the Indie charts were the only music charts that mattered. It’s to the Coldplay's credit that all three channels would readily play the Video to their debut single Yellow.

I’ve always been fascinated by what happened to Coldplay, to the point where the first thing that I think when I hear any Coldplay song, regardless of whether I like the song or not, the first words, every time, it’s always, “What the hell happened to Coldplay?”

Parachutes, the first album, was gloriously depressing. Yellow is probably the most upbeat track on it. Anyone who can sing, “We live in a beautiful world,” and make it sound as melancholy as Chris Martin does, on Don’t Panic, the first track on the album, is doing alright by me. Whimsical melancholy usually sits well with the Indie crowd. A certain amount of angst and an industrial grinding guitar sound works well too. By the time you get to, “Everything’s not lost,” at the end, you might think that there’s something hopeful going on there, but you’re only going to tell yourself that everything’s not lost when you’re somewhere near the bottom and feeling like everything may well be lost. My view is slanted with memories of drunkenly singing along with an old friend in my South-End Green basement flat. We were stacked full of homemade cocktails, with friends looking on, not caring how out of tune we probably were. Doesn’t everyone think they can sing when they’re drunk?

I think for many people, Coldplay are forever stuck in the “A Rush of Blood to the Head” era. I don’t know if the plan was to get everyone saying Anthemic, but Anthemic-Anthemic-Anthemic is all I can say.

Of all those most famed anthemic sounds, there’s something defiant in the sound of “God put a smile upon your face,” something bittersweet about, “The Scientist,” and with “A rush of blood to the head,” they seem to have stumbled upon an opus of angst and disillusionment. It’s one of those that furiously bubbles but skillfully and beautifully never quite boils over. “I'm gonna buy a gun and start a war, if you can tell me something worth fighting for,” seems a million miles from where Coldplay are now. “Some will laugh and some just sit and cry, but you just sit down there, and you wonder why.” That puts me squarely back in 2002, making the most of feeling lost and disconnected.

The Scientist holds a special place in my heart.

The video to the song shows Chris Martin walking (must check how many Coldplay videos feature Chris Martin walking). He’s walking through North London, on train tracks, through the Bourne Woods in Surrey and jumping over walls, all filmed in reverse.

I’d finished my shift at 10pm and made my way from Swiss cottage to Westminster tube. When I came out from underground my mix tape was playing The Scientist and the irresistble urge to recreate the whole walking backward thing was too strong. I proceeded to cross Westminster bridge walking backward until I got to the Marriott hotel where I was meeting a musician guy who I knew for late night drinks. The rest of the night is all White Russians and a car ride to “Norf of the river,” because my friend knew that I lived somewhere north of the Thames. God knows where he dropped me and how I got home. God knows how he got home alive.

I remember how the initial release of the third album, X&Y, was likened to watching Chelsea, at the height of their successful years in the early 2000s, when Roman Abramovich sunk a lot of money into the team. You knew that what you were watching was good football, but it just wasn’t exciting to watch Chelsea steamroll Wigan 8-0. 

Sticking with the football analogies, maybe there just weren't enough “belters” on X&Y to please some folk. Perhaps, outside of Fix You there wasn’t a track that they could call anthemic. No one wanted to watch a team skilfully pass the ball around the field and more of less walk the ball into the net. They wanted belters from outside the box, screamers of a strike from a free kick just outside the area. If X&Y was considered too skilful, too polished, too unlike the first two albums, then it may be doing Coldplay a disservice. As I’ve been writing this I’ve been listening to those first three albums and to be fair to that third album, the last one I’d ever buy, there’s a lot more to it than just “I will fix yooouu.”

This year’s Glasto Festival I watched their turn on the Pyramid stage.  Of course, I only liked the ones from the first three albums. Viva la Vida was probably the only one I recognised of the post X&Y era. I had to Google the name of it, because to me it’s always known as the “I used to rule the world” song. I do also like their Christmas song. I’m now imagining myself at Glastonbury, it’s the height of summer, and I’ll be shouting, “Play Christmas lights!” And Chris Martin would probably oblige. He always looks like he’s having a good time. So, why not play a Christmas song in June? At one point there seemed to be a hundred people on the Pyramid stage with the band this year and the half hour jamming session that followed was fun. Fun? Yes. But this was more of a spectacle, more of a carnival than it had been twenty years prior.

Twenty years prior, Coldplay had been the Saturday headliners at the 2005 Glastonbury Festival. I remember watching on TV and, I don’t know if it was the Tequilla’s talking or my consuming most of a Vodka Watermelon* all by myself that fuelled these thoughts, but I remember a sense of this being a landmark performance, something momentous. It wasn’t a cultural landmark to rival the Woodstock concerts of 69. No one who wasn’t there would be claiming all these years later to have been there, just so they could claim a little piece of ownership of a cultural high point in history. Yet, it wasn’t only the occasion, it was the performance, the rising to the occasion, carving out their own unforgettable Glasto moment. And it was the band, their music, not fancy staging or pyrotechnics (not until the last song at least) that won out. Watching it back now for the first time in years it still feels packed with a heartfelt intensity for most of the show. Songs we know so well seemed to be given a lot more oomph, and the different inflections Chris Martin came up with in many of the tracks makes it seem unique in a way that only live music can.

The thing about the gig in Crystal Palace, my Woodstock of not belonging, my cultural landmark in time, the pinnacle of being alone in a crowd, is that the stuff that I thought was spontaneous and of the moment was easily repeated two days later. My friend Jimmy and I both agreed later that the gig we’d attended felt like a carbon copy of what we’d seen on TV before. It’s funny how I felt more attached, more present, more “there” when watching it on TV and didn’t feel “there” at all in Crystal Palace.

The uniqueness of the whole thing was gone and was replaced by the uniqueness of the regimented queuing to get in, the ability to lose one another in a crowd and never meet up again that evening, and all the realities of being there, as opposed to the romantic idea of being there. I now imagine those who went to Glastonbury saying, “We’ll always remember when Chris Martin swung the light over his head during Fix You.” Of course you will. Everyone will have that same memory whichever Coldplay concert they attended, because he probably did it at every gig and, as I’ve only just found out whilst writing this, he did it in the video to Fix You.

If you’ve never seen Prince performing his guitar solo at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, then you really should. In that performance his guitaring is ridiculous, his showmanship insane. Never mind bending over backward on the edge of the stage so that he is almost dipping his head into the front row of the audience, whilst a bodyguard hangs on to him. He follows that up, at the end of the song, by throwing his guitar in the air and it never comes down and he walks off stage.

I know that none of that was spontaneous, but he did it in such a way that you’d believe it was. And if he were to do it in every concert you’d never tire of it and you’d believe you’d never seen its likes before. I do think Chris Martin is great to watch, and he mixes his intensity with a knack of also stopping to realise that he’s having fun whilst performing.  I can however imagine concert goers saying, “Is he still doing that thing with the light? It’s getting old now.”

Before Crystal Palace the worst concert I’d ever been to was three years earlier. Bob Dylan, May 2002, a concert so awful that they had to destroy the building it took place in. Look it up. Docklands London Arena. Gone.

He sang every song in the same fashion, in that whispery gravelly steady world wearied tone, which was fine for songs like Things Have Changed and Not Dark Yet. But that tone didn’t fit classic Dylan songs. He managed to make every song unrecognisable. The standout memory that remains is of arriving at the Arena and feeling like I was going to an American Sporting event. I’d not linked overpriced T-Shirts on sale in the many merchandising stands and giant sporting arenas and Bob Dylan all together before that point in time. I put our chances of getting offered a joint at next to zero.

Dylan was a speck on the stage to us sitting a million miles from our cheap seats. Me and Jimmy (It was always Me and Jimmy back then), were in total “what the fuck is happening?” mode. I was probably gobbing off. Those were very rebellious days back then. Some guy sat behind me told me to shut the hell up. I protested, pointing to the stage, saying, “I think he’s making more noise than me.” And then I went off in a huff and strolled down to nearer the stage. I was going to at least be able to say that I saw the man. Weird memories of standing near the front, realising that I was in the disabled access area. I thought, “Hey, I’ve got this close and yet every song still sounds like the same song. Is he just playing Things have changed over and over?”

I retreated to the back of the arena. I remember standing on some balcony near the bar. I saw Jimmy leaning on a rail. I stood next to him. We both looked on and agreed that arena concerts were a bad thing. We chatted and drank. We never saw a single joint being smoked. We knew it sucked. Jimmy broke off mid conversation to tell me, “I think he’s playing Don’t Think Twice (a personal favourite) but everything sounds the same anyway.” I listened hard. I heard, “I once loved a woman, a child I’m told,” and said, “Oh, yeah. So he is.”

The vibe of that whole gig was wrong. It was a sanitised echoey droning drab impersonal delivery of songs we really wanted to love but couldn’t. Coldplay at Crystal Palace Sports ground on the other hand, was musically as good as they were at Glasto two days earlier but devoid of feeling. I believe that it may have had a lot to do with the crowd that day. I was on my own for much of the night in a sea of forty thousand people, none of them seeming to connect at all. It did not feel like a mass of people. It felt like a mass of small bunches of people in their own impregnable bubbles and if you got too near one you’d bounce off it and stumble into another equally impregnable bubble. Even the sound of your singing along, more like chanting, to God put a smile upon your face could not penetrate the air around these small groups of people.

Jimmy and I had agreed that should we get split up we’d meet back at a certain beer tent. There was no mobile phone reception. We’d not be able to call one another. We were going dark. From this point on it was radio silence.  I said, this is the Alamo. This is where we fall back to, should we get split up, should we be lost in this hostile crowd.

After watching one guy get roughed up by security for climbing the outside frame of the disabled access stand, we were convinced that, at best, this wasn’t friendly territory. I’m not sure what he was trying to achieve but the lad kept trying to climb up the side of the stands, as though it were his childhood climbing frame, and the security man kept pulling him off and throwing him to the ground. I think it was on the third and fourth attempt that the security guy hollered, “Stay down. Stay down.” I avoided the urge to comment on how, if this kept going, the climbing guy would have every right to be in the disabled access seats. No one else seemed to even see what was going on. Move along. Nothing to see. Enjoy the music, just like you did when you saw it on TV two days ago.

It felt like a small detail in a long and weird trip. The evening was spent wondering from one spot to another, weaving between small groups of people and never feeling like it was possible to mingle. I got close to the stage but slightly off to the left and I still didn’t feel like I was there. The idea of one big happy crowd, all chanting along together was something that seemed more real on TV than in reality. I dropped back to the Alamo on several occasions but never found Jimmy. I found a decent spot to stand and watched it all to the end, standing there, with a patented look of bewilderment. Once the concert ended, I walked like a zombie and was swept away with the thousands of people towards a train station. At a certain point some of the crowd started to drift away from the mosh pit that was building at the entrance to Crystal Palace Station. Getting into that station was only going to continue the bad trip. So, I followed a smaller crowd, hearing murmurs that there was another station within walking distance. My head was full of weirdness. I could have walked forever. It wouldn’t be the first time I kept walking and walking and walking to be anywhere but here.

Ahead of me there was a group of five or six young people. They were laughing and joshing about and then, one of the girls stepped on a drain cover, or where there should have been a drain cover, and immediately sunk into the ground. She was swallowed up by the pavement. It looked like a puddle had tried to eat her.  She sunk only so far and was up to her armpits in drain water. Two of the guys hauled her up quickly, whisking her up and out of the hole. I put my head down and marched past. I saw the girl sobbing and being comforted. It was none of my business. She seemed to have people caring for her. I’d not felt involved with others all night.  I didn’t think that was about to change with someone who’d just fallen down a drain. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t caught herself as she plunged. How far down the drain can anyone go? I can’t remember much in the way of specifics regarding Coldplay’s performance. But I remember clearly a girl falling down a hole in the pavement.

Not long after that I lost all interest in Coldplay. From 2000 to 2005 they were one thing. After that, nothing I heard from them rekindled any love. They felt like something entirely different.  Things were changing by 2008. There was upheaval and change on the way. 2008 was all about credit crunch. It was about World economies. Everything was all about money. Spotify was just around the corner. The ability to flick from one song to the next was never more readily available. Certain cultural shifts seemed to play a part in the way music was listened to but also what was listened to. I’m thinking of the days of B-Sides and Rarities. I’m thinking of the way there’s often a hidden gem on an album. I’m thinking of the beauty and craft that goes into choosing the order of songs on any album.

This got me thinking. Although concert attendance is not directly connected to 2008 being the nexus of all things turning a bit shittier, I think it’s still worth asking: What were the biggest selling tours from 2008 onward? (The following, nabbed from Wikipedia, is a list of best selling tours from 2008 to present day. It’s listed highest to lowest selling. I take no credit for any research. Also, as it’s Wikipedia, the accuracy is never guaranteed. But it seems to ring true).

Taylor Swift 2023–2024         

Coldplay 2022–2025

Elton John 2018–2023           

Ed Sheeran 2017–2019

U2 2009–2011

Bruce Springsteen 2023–2025

Ed Sheeran 2022–2025

The Weeknd   2022–2025     

Harry Styles    2021–2023     

Pink 2023–2024         

Guns N' Roses 2016–2019   

Beyoncé 2023                          

The Rolling Stones 2017–2021         

Coldplay 2016–2017

Roger Waters 2010–2013

AC/DC 2008–2010    

Metallica 2016–2019

G.E.M. 2023–2025

Madonna 2008 – 2009

It’s a Taylor Swift World. She sits at the top of the heap. But it’s a heap of what exactly? With a few exceptions, there seems to be a sense of looking backwards, looking to bands and artists of the past. If there’s a consensus that any Coldplay albums from 2008 onwards were less inspired and more generic, more influenced by aligning with popular acts of the time, then it fits in with a narrative of a significant cultural change, one that the sounds of Parachutes, A Rush of Blood to the Head and even X&Y, could no longer thrive in, and everything since has left a legacy of many people asking, “What the hell happened to Coldplay?”

*Vodka Watermelon: For anyone who has never tried it: Buy a whole watermelon. Buy a bottle of vodka. Cut a hole in the watermelon. Open the bottle of vodka. Stick neck of said bottle of vodka into Watermelon. Leave for a few days until all vodka has soaked in. Eat watermelon.