Live review – Coldplay at Wembley Stadium

Coldplay at Wembley Stadium, 27 August
★★★★

Howard Jones recently told Classic Pop that Things Can Only Get Better was always going to be a Top 10 hit because it was designed to be a singalong: get enough “Woah”s into a song that fans can get into, and you won’t go far wrong. Forget, if it’s possible, the spectacle of a Coldplay show in 2025. The real reason they’re playing a record 10 nights at Wembley, a quarter of a century since their debut album, is because nobody does a woah like Coldplay. Or Coldplay-ay-o, as Chris Martin would sing it.

It’s why, even with BTS only appearing on the big screens, their K-Pop collab My Universe is as big a moment as Clocks or Paradise. Of the 800,000 people seeing Coldplay at Wembley this summer, maybe 27 of them won’t be singing along by Fix You in the encore.

Although the show begins with information about the charities the concert is helping, it’s easy to see where the ticket money goes in a Coldplay gig. No matter how many times you’ve read about Coldplay’s light-up wristbands, or even experienced them before at previous shows, they’re literally dazzling to witness in the moment.

Becoming part of a giant tifo – a love heart here, a UFO there – or a multicoloured sensory overload while bouncing up and down, or the simplicity of Wembley turning yellow for Hymn For The Weeke…, sorry, Yellow: if you’re now duty bound to play stadiums forevermore, you might as well make it look gorgeous. See also the “Moongoggles,” which shoot out dayglo love hearts all around you during Feelslikeimfallinginlove in a way identical-looking old-school 3D glasses somehow didn’t.

Dazzling Display

The sheer scale of the entertainment continues in the way the entire length of the stadium is used. Forget an ego ramp extending maybe a quarter of the way into the audience, it’s genuinely impossible to work out where the band will appear next. An extended backwards outro in The Scientist masks Coldplay reappearing halfway into the crowd, with Simon Bolivar’s Venezuelan Symphony Orchestra variously both on the main stage and scattered elsewhere on the ramp, before a suitably stirring Viva La Vida.

If it was all about the spectacle, you could pigeonhole Coldplay as music’s Cirque De Soleil and wonder when they’d be doing a Music Of The Sphere residency at Las Vegas Sphere. But, as with their best songs, the night is all about the heart at Coldplay’s core.

Jonny Buckland gets to display his eternally underrated musicianship in a powerful The Scientist, a glimpse of an alternative universe where Coldplay became the new Pink Floyd, while he and Guy Berryman are fabulously smooth in Cemeteries Of London – played here for the first time since 2011, as part of the tour’s rotating run of live obscurities.

Stadium Spectacle

Martin announces Cemeteries Of London as the band’s moment of self-indulgence – “If you want to go to the toilet or call your mum, now’s the time” – but in truth an old forgotten favourite will always win out over a shoehorned-in new tune. There are only three songs from Moon Music, and We Pray is the night’s sole grim moment, Elyanna and Shone unable to prevent Coldplay from seeming try-hard. We Pray is a laudable sentiment, but is as ill-advised as Madonna trying to keep pace with Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj.

Similarly, spring-heeled Chainsmokers collab Something Just Like This should have been mighty, but is undone by musicians in kids’ cartoon costumes dancing about, like a CBeebies Daft Punk.

Really, those are minor quibbles when offset by playing classics like it could all disappear if they didn’t give their all on a random Wednesday. Higher Power, A Sky Full Of Stars and Adventure Of A Lifetime demand your feet and voice. Violet Hill sees two fans invited onstage, accompanying Martin down the ego ramp until they’re sat at his piano for a rendition that should have been saccharine but instead feels touching and unique. Even a relative throwaway like People Of The Pride is made massive, glammy and bombastic like the best song Muse never wrote.

By the closing All My Love, Coldplay have long since obliterated any cynicism. Love really does feel like the only option for humanity. Are Coldplay’s stadium powers waning? No way-eh-o.

SETLIST

Higher Power
Adventure Of A Lifetime
Paradise
The Scientist
Viva la Vida
Hymn For The Weekend
Violet Hill
Charlie Brown
Yellow
Human Heart
People Of The Pride
Clocks
We Pray
Infinity Sign
Something Just Like This
My Universe
A Sky Full Of Stars
Sunrise
Sparks
Cemeteries Of London
The Jumbotron Song
Fix You
Feelslikeimfallinginlove

Encore
All My Love

*Featured image shows Chris Martin live on stage at Hull’s Craven Park Stadium on 18 August (Photo by Andrew Benge/Getty Images)

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