Coldplay ready to rock fans at Croke and make the critics choke

Lest there be any lingering suspicion that Coldplay somehow became the planet’s biggest band by accident, one need only look at their opening number at this year’s Glastonbury Festival.
They kicked off an impressive fifth headlining appearance with Yellow, their first sizeable hit from all the way back in 2000, when they were just another gang of contenders. Right from the intro’s acoustic strum, a gargantuan crowd hung on Chris Martin’s every syllable.
There’ll be similar scenes when the English band play a four-night run at Croke Park this week. That’s roughly 320,000 people through the turnstiles, a figure very few acts — Taylor Swift? Definitely. Springsteen? U2? Possibly — could contemplate. Given that the tickets were apparently the fastest selling in Ireland, Coldplay could probably have matched Garth Brooks’s five-night stint at the very least. But even four shows at GAA headquarters is relatively small potatoes for this behemoth of a band.
The Music Of The Spheres world tour, on the go since March 2022, sold out Wembley Stadium six times that year and then ten nights (more than 600,000 people) in Buenos Aires a few months later. This year they hit Singapore for another six in January and, once Dublin is done and dusted, they’ll head for Australia and New Zealand. According to a recent Billboard report, the present take of about $945 million (€830 million) makes it “the biggest rock tour of all time”. Not bad going for the band that Alan McGee — the Creation Records man, and the bloke who discovered Oasis — once called bedwetters.
They are, by a country mile, the most successful rock band (“Coldplay are not a rock band,” according to Bono of U2, “they should not be judged by rock rules”) of the 21 st century, having sold more than 100 million records. A quick scan of Spotify shows that at least eight Coldplay songs have passed the billion-stream mark. For comparison, U2 have one, Springsteen doesn’t have any.
Success came quickly to the four-piece formed at University College London in the late 1990s. Parachutes, their debut album in 2000, hit the top spot in the British charts, driven by that ubiquitous single, and won the Brit award for best album as well as a Mercury music prize nomination.
Their homeland conquered, they set their sights on America with 2002’s superior A Rush of Blood to the Head, a record on which ability caught up with ambition, housing as it did several of their best songs. The Scientist, inspired by Martin trying George Harrison’s Isn’t it a Pity and coming up with a different chord sequence instead, remains a deserved staple of their set list. The thrilling piano riff of Clocks was a late addition that management insisted on. This was a wise move as it bagged a Grammy, made it into Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, and was chosen by Bono in his typically understated way as one of the 60 songs that saved his life, calling it “unspeakably great”.
This probably pleased Martin no end. He wrote: “I don’t buy weekend tickets to Ireland and hang out in front of their gates, but U2 are the only band whose entire catalogue I know by heart.” He remembered playing their A Sort of Homecoming to his unborn child. Mind you, he also once claimed to have dreamt about Westlife.
As well as absorbing their music, Coldplay paid close attention to the way U2 handled their business and decided on a similar financial four-way split, an important factor in keeping both bands together for so long. Detractors have referred to Coldplay as a poor man’s U2, which the unkind might call an insult both to poor men and to Bono’s gang, but such sniping is the rock snob’s preserve. Bono and Martin did duet on a charity version of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On in 2001, and Coldplay supported U2 in Slane the same year.
The justified success of the second album — 17 million sales and counting — which one reviewer said showed none of the timidity of their debut, elevated Martin to a new level of fame, one his three more anonymous band mates, fortunately for them, never had to worry about. The Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow met Martin at a Coldplay show and they married a year later, in 2003. This high-profile union shoved a press-shy individual firmly into the global celebrity spotlight. The pair “consciously uncoupled” in 2014.
Coldplay’s third LP, X&Y, was 2005’s bestselling album and contained at least two songs inspired by marriage and parenthood — the hit Speed Of Sound and their massive weepie Fix You which closed a memorable set in Marlay Park in June that year. They stretched out with Viva La Vida in 2008, bringing in the producer Brian Eno (another U2 connection) who encouraged them to make every song sound different, an approach that shifted more than ten million copies and won them another Grammy. A lawsuit against them for copyright infringement was dismissed. More recently a case by their former manager settled. Since then there have been several albums of varying quality that have consistently topped charts everywhere, right up to 2021’s Music of the Spheres. They’ll release Moon Music on October 4.
They’ve played to millions at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Paralympics, at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show and in consistently record-breaking tours, including their Croke Park debut in 2017. Collaborations with Rihanna (Princess of China), the Chainsmokers, (Something Just Like This), and Selena Gomez, (Let Somebody Go), have done their mass appeal no harm. Some might sniff at the very ordinary My Universe, recorded with South Korean pop sensations BTS, but it made canny business sense, debuting at No 1 on the Billboard 100 and opening up an even wider audience.
Success is one thing, critical approval is another. As far back as 2005, The New York Times published an article titled “The Case Against Coldplay” wherein the band were accused of being “the most insufferable band of the decade”. In 2008, Andy Gill called them pompous, mawkish and unbearably smug in his Independent piece, “Why I Hate Coldplay”. The New Yorker went a bit pretentious with the headline, “Why Don’t I Like Coldplay? An Investigation” in 2011. Its writer, Sasha Frere-Jones, called their music “vexingly adequate”.
There is something about Martin that rubs certain people up the wrong way — possibly the same crowd for whom Bono can do no right. Martin’s support for various causes and the band’s determination to at least try to offset their carbon footprint are hardly war crimes (and those famous sustainable flashing wristbands are a great idea, allowing the audience to join the show and bringing intimacy to the largest stadium). Neither is being an apparently nice guy who doesn’t throw televisions through windows or demand that his manager move clouds blocking his view.
That being said, there will always be those who wonder where the guitars went, who reckon the second half of Coldplay’s career has all the edge of a blunt circle. The happy souls celebrating in Croke Park who just happen to appreciate the almost universal appeal of Coldplay’s music won’t care about any of that though, and nor should they.