‘My life would a failure if I hadn’t seen Western Australia’: Coldplay dazzles Perth
Coldplay’s WA-exclusive show was a commitment to spectacle. They appeared to enjoy it as much as the 60,000 in attendance, but stepping into the stadium felt like touching down in an eco-friendly bizarro world.
The Tourism WA cheque must have been one handsome payday for Coldplay. Near the end of the first night of the British rock quartet’s two Perth-exclusive shows, frontman Chris Martin performed a “one-time-only” song for the state.
“If it’s shitty, please don’t put it on YouTube,” he warned the crowd before launching into the track, which referenced everything from snakes in parks, hardcore surfers that fear no sharks, Perth’s musical heroes Bon Scott and Tame Impala, and cricket legends Justin Langer and Dennis Lillee.
“My life would have been a total failure if I hadn’t seen Western Australia,” Martin warbled to a swooning crowd of 60,000.
It’s hardly surprising that Martin and his crew — guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman, and drummer Will Champion — can command a crowd; they’ve been packing stadiums for the better part of their career. But this moment was breathtaking in its ramshackle intimacy and weirdness.
In retrospect, the whole show was weird. Stepping into the stadium felt like touching down in an eco-friendly bizarro world.
The schtick for the band’s Music of the Spheres shows is that they are eco-conscious — a point driven home via QR codes that lead you to its online manifesto.
Energy is harnessed from stationary bikes and a kinetic dancefloor; a backstage generator hums on cooking oil, and the audience is decked out in LED wristbands made from 100 per cent compostable, plant-based materials. In between support acts, the screens flitted between Coldplay’s philanthropic work with ClientEarth, The Ocean Cleanup, and One Tree Planted, and advertisements for their €45 ($75) T-shirts.
Whatever thoughts you may have about the environmental/buy my merch hullabaloo immediately exit your brain once the band takes the stage and launches into an unrelenting barrage of hits.
It almost goes without saying that Coldplay is an epic live band. They are impressively tight; Martin bounces around stage with all the vim and vigour you’d expect from someone who was married to Gwyneth Paltrow for over a decade and likely has a healthy reserve of Lion’s Mane adaptogens coursing through their veins. They are maestros at coaxing emotions out of the crowd. And their melodies — even on limper, new songs like ‘Human Heart’ — sound positively gargantuan in the stadium setting.
If you hadn’t already fulfilled your biological destiny by shedding a tear to ‘The Scientist,’ you were reduced to a blubbering mess when Martin invited a young fan who had beaten cancer onto the stage to sit with him by the piano and sing ‘Everglow.’ Even the iciest of hearts stood no chance against the thawing power of witnessing ‘Fix You’ live — the entire stadium aglow with golden beams twinkling from the wristbands.
The strength of the hits alone would have sustained this show, but Coldplay is committed to the spectacle. It was a sensory overload attacking you at every angle: pyrotechnics, confetti cannons firing off, beach balls bouncing between the audience, Martin on a hoverboard, the entire band performing in alien robot masks, and a bizarre bit of puppetry with the Jim Henson studio-designed Angel Moon — which felt a lot like a scene from the Leos Carax Cannes-winner Annette.
There were three Australian support acts. Local opener Adrian Dzvuke was up first and had the sauce in spades. Dressed in a twee Wes Anderson-y burnt orange dux, he dripped with charisma as he powered through 20 minutes of liquid smooth Afro Pop. Brisbane indie-pop artist Thelma Plum was nervous — one suspects there were issues with her in-ear monitors — but her closing song, the glorious ‘Better in Blak,’ was immense.
It seems like Amy Shark, the last to go on before Coldplay, crawled out of the womb primed for a stadium stage. She was all swaggering and seasoned professionalism, making her way through hits like ‘Adore’ and ‘I Said Hi,’ and crowd-pleasing covers of Bic Runga’s ‘Sway’ and Kylie Minogue’s ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head.’
With chutzpah, she playfully imagined the conversation within the Coldplay camp about her selection as the support act, impersonating Martin in what can only be described as a drunk-Cockney accent, she said “Now there’s this Amy Shark bird … bloody hell, she’s amazing; let’s go, baby!”
The two Coldplay concerts, on November 18 and 19 at Perth’s Optus Stadium, are the only Australian dates for the band — a massive coup brokered by the tourism arm of the Western Australian government and music promoter Live Nation for an undisclosed fee.
A record-breaking attendance of 140,000 is anticipated for the two shows, surpassing Ed Sheeran’s previous record of 120,000 at the Perth stadium.
Over 40,000 tickets were sold to interstate residents, and Tourism Council WA Chief Executive Evan Hall estimates a $68 million boost to the state’s economy from these visitors.
Geordie Gray was a guest of Live Nation.
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