After a not-very-rushed dinner at Richtree (née Marché) on Thursday, Pauline and I joined ZMP and 17k other fans at a sold-out Air Canada Centre to see Coldplay’s second of two nights in Toronto. These two shows were rather special because they were filming a DVD here; to the extent that they had removed the Maple Leafs banners from the rafters. This was my first concert featuring a single artist since I saw Radiohead many years ago (although I have been to other arena concerts, outdoor concerts, and smaller environments in the meantime).

Richard Ashcroft was the opener, and while having a solo career and being relatively famous with his former band The Verve, was very meh. A few in the crowd went wild for several of his 7ish songs, but only when he played Bittersweet Symphony did the cheering kick in. Fittingly, it was his last and after a short break we had our feature presentation.

Coldplay have been on tour awhile, and their setlist is pretty well-known. They didn’t deviate from that tonight, playing the following songs:

Square One
Politik
Yellow
Speed of Sound
God Put A Smile On Your Face
What If
How You See The World
Don’t Panic
White Shadows
The Scientist
Kingdom Come
Ring of Fire
Trouble
Clocks
Talk

Encore #1
Swallowed in the Sea
In My Place
Fix You

The set started off with Square One, which I wasn’t really hyped up about. The song at least, because the accompanying display of a countdown between each chorus and a light show afterwards was neat; but perhaps it was in comparison to their support. Politik followed with more lights, but this time of the strobe quality and in monochrome.

Yellow ended their first triple with a bang as huge yellow balloons fell from the sky towards the end of the song (you know in the video where the sunny sky appears?), my research into their tour spoiled the surprise, but I was still impressed by the size of the balloons themselves! After Speed of Sound, they played a song the explained “what it feels like to be the best band in the world”. GPASOYF was one of my favorite tracks on AROBTTH so I quickly realized that “God let us play by the CN Tower” and “God gave us music by the Arcade Fire” were not part of the original lyrics! Both lines drew great applause from the crowd.

What If was the first true torch song of the night, How You See The World was a song that I had never heard before and started off like one of their slower, newer song. But near the end when the song picked up (kind of like what happens in Fix You), Coldplay sounded very much like they did in their EP days. A few songs later, The Scientist was accompanied by a factor of ten display on the screen. I had heard about this previously but totally forgot that they would do that until I saw it. If you don’t know what it is, it’s an image of the galaxy and slowly zooming in the areas marked by a square that is one tenth the size of the previous square.

Their next song was Kingdom Come, and what i thought was the best performance of the night. Chris Martin apparently did not think so, because he broke out of singing in the middle to admit that he had just made the first mistake of the night. However I liked their rendition of it which was slightly different than the version on the CD. The jumped immediately into Ring of Fire, a Johnny Cash cover. It had a surprise in the middle where they seemed to have stopped, and Chris then mentioned that they forgot a verse. Finally they finished their “acoustic” set with Trouble. This was, I thought the worse song of the night. I think Trouble is a song that requires a delicate, clean touch; but it sounded muddy and did not have the moody appeal of the CD version. It was unfortunate as from the previous songs, I could tell that the sound system was great (unlike my previous concert), you could hear the guitars being strummed without any distortion.

Coldplay finished up their set with Clocks, complete with a very cool laser light display, and Talk. Everyone was up on their feet at the end because Talk was amazing and everyone was pumped. Of course, we had to do the stupid cheering to bring on the (expected) encore, and the came on stage to play Swallowed in the Sea. OMG! how did they have a background display and light show that went perfectly with the song when it was supposed to be an encore? Was it prepared? This is one of my pet peeves about concerts. Anyways, they continued with In My Place, where Chris Martin jumped off the stage and ran to the back of floor area (surrounded by security guards), and finally with Fix You (after a longer walk back to the stage.

Overall, I was surprised how they sounded so close to their CD sound, and I chalk it up to the ACC for having a great sound system. Also, I was tempted to bring my camera, and aftering checking their camera policies it seemed OK; but I didn’t really want to carry around my camera so I opted for bringing my pocket camera; which explains my less than stellar photos. Finally, here’s a bonus:

Top 3 Favorite Coldplay Songs

1. The Scientist
2. Trouble
3. Don’t Panic

Top 3 Overrated Colplay Songs

1. Yellow
2. Clocks
3. Speed of Sound

Reviews elsewhere:
coldplaying.com
mycoldplay.com

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: concerts