Concert review: Coldplay has a lot to celebrate at Bell Centre

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For all the sing-alongs audible from St-Léonard, the confetti, the lasers, the pillars of fire, the even more confetti, the balloons and have I mentioned the confetti yet, the most memorable arena moment of Coldplay’s Bell Centre blowout Tuesday may have been when Chris Martin rattled off a list of reasons why you should never go to an arena concert.

“Thank you for giving us your Tuesday night,” the frontman said, before pointedly acknowledging the sold-out house section by section. “For coming through the traffic and through the ticket prices … and the drinks prices and standing behind someone tall. We know it’s a pain coming to a big show.”

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He kept going, and it may have set a new bar for sincere gratitude from superstars who can afford not to care about the travails of commoners shuffling down the line at the concession stand. Shows don’t get much bigger than Tuesday’s — even after the sustained spectacle of last weekend’s Osheaga festival, the scope of this one was remarkable — but at the grandiose level at which Coldplay operates, they don’t get much more personal, either.

You could feel the band (especially Martin) striving and succeeding to interact on a human scale — not just journeying down the catwalk to a secondary stage, but playing an encore from a tertiary stage embedded in the stands. When Martin halted the massive chiming intro of Charlie Brown to ask for a single-song moratorium on cellphones so the audience could focus on jumping as one, it felt like both a standard part of the set and a sincere request for connection. When he made the journey through the crowd back to the main walkway from the band’s temporary perch in the reds near the end of the show, the hugging and high-fiving went beyond a few rote greetings.

Rather than separate pop royalty from their subjects, the zillion-dollar production strengthened that bond through a genuine sense of celebration. Martin motioned for a rainbow confetti explosion to punctuate the gentle techno drive of the opening A Head Full of Dreams, and one got the impression he was as giddy at the effect as anyone in the room. The wristbands handed out to fans lit up, changed colours, pulsed in time with the music, and gave everyone a role in the concert’s ambitious lighting design.

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These were familiar party tricks to anyone who saw Coldplay’s last Bell Centre shows, five years ago almost to the day. Familiar, but phenomenal. It may become problematic if the visual extravaganza doesn’t evolve more by the next tour — and even Martin’s elaborate thank-you speech prompted some déjà vu from the previous visit, as did his slick but winning comment that “this is our 94th show (of the tour); as far as we’re concerned, that’s 93 rehearsals for Montreal.” For now, if it can still prompt a spine tingle when the lights turn shades of canary and lemon for Yellow 17 years on from the first time, the eye-bathing effect of thousands of human LED displays certainly hasn’t grown old yet.

The music wasn’t merely a soundtrack for the carnival. Slotting the emotional waterworks of The Scientist a mere four songs into the set spoke to how many potential showstoppers Coldplay has amassed over the course of seven albums. The comparatively dark God Put a Smile Upon Your Face saw Martin, guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion huddled near the centre of the stage before Paradise’s goofball but infectious rave climax sent Martin catapulting down the catwalk. By the time Fix You was given a churchly intro, the perpetual-motion frontman had earned the right to lie down for a breather on the walkway. It didn’t take long for him to recharge: as he spiralled back toward the main stage when the heart-on-sleeve devotional reached its climax, his joy was palpable.

It says a lot that the unforced intimacy of that acoustic encore at the rear of the venue — highlighted by Champion’s understated vocal in Don’t Panic, Track 1 from Album 1, and a seemingly impromptu solo Martin performance of Green Eyes — was at least as compelling as the laser-laden confetti blizzard that followed for A Sky Full of Stars’ gargantuan clubland bounce. From the performance to the party favours, everything worked in tandem to make this the overwhelming communal experience that arena concerts should strive to be. Whatever pain is involved in coming to a big show, Tuesday night was worth it.

Coldplay performs again Wednesday, Aug. 9 at the Bell Centre, with AlunaGeorge and Izzy Bizu. Showtime is 7 p.m. The concert is sold out.

jzivitz@postmedia.com

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