Concert review: Coldplay

Tonight L and I went to the Coldplay concert at Madison Square Garden. It was so good I couldn’t stand it. Clapping my hands and shifting my weight back and forth was not enough to physically express my happiness. But I’m not one of those guys who raises their arms over their heads and just soaks it all in like Jesus at a Def Leppard concert. So I just clapped and swayed and wooed like most other people.

They had an amazing light board behind them. They opened with “Square One” and immediately the board lit up in white behind them with a string of four numbers running along with it. What will happen when it reaches zero, I absently wondered as the band’s silhouettes crossed the screen. Well, let me tell you: the clock flattens to 0000, the chorus of the song kicks in and the lights on the lightboard and around the stage explode with color – the whole place is lit up and moving, green, red, blue, bursting from the stage out to us, the band may not even exist anymore, it’s just this kinetic explosion of sight and sound that announces to 15,000 people that something is happening. And that set the tone for the rest of the two-hour set. Most of the music was from the new album, which I loved for the total rock-arena anthem tracks, where we used hand gestures to follow the notes up the scale and sing along to them like this: “Bup be doo be doo boo dee boo boo” (that’s the opening line from “Talk”). Except for a few of their glacially paced, funeral dirge, evolution-is-passing-you-by ballads, I was in hog heaven.

Not to mention the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow and precocious wee Apple were sitting about 50 feet from us, and that when Chris Martin ventured into the audience he ended up about 35 feet from us, and that basically I couldn’t have asked for better seats or a better companion or a better experience. And do I regret spending 35 dollars I don’t have on a concert t-shirt that I’m almost afraid to wear? No, I do not. Not for the music, not for the emotion, not for the sight of the whitest crowd in Manhattan dancing poorly and without shame on a Tuesday night.