Gig review: Coldplay at Sewell Group Craven Park, Hull
The five-time Glastonbury headliners deliver on the promise of a full-production stadium spectacular destined to go down as a cultural coup in local folklore.
This concert was designed to work around the world,” Coldplay frontman Chris Martin says a handful of songs into their second performance at Sewell Group Craven Park. Beneath the skies, amid a sea of LED wristbands, the star is caught in the drizzle that breezes off the estuary amid a lightshow of technicolour proportions. He grins. “But the place it’s going to sound best is on a rainy night in Hull.”
When the London four-piece – Martin, guitarist Jonny Buckland, bass player Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion – announced they would preface a record-breaking Wembley Stadium residency with two nights on the banks of the Humber, news reverberated with legitimate global shock.
News outlets from America to Australia scrambled to cover with perplexed clamour; fans worldwide from Congleton to Chengdu fought for a seat at this comparatively intimate stop.
But in this proud Yorkshire city, a double-date stand at the back-end of the band’s Music of the Spheres World Tour represents not just the cultural coup of the century but a celebration of the region itself. Craven Park secured these gigs in part thanks to the connection between Hull KR owner Neil Hudgell and Warrington Wolves supremo Simon Moran, who promotes the group; beyond rugby league religion too, half of the tickets were set aside for nearby postcodes, while native rapper Chiedu Oraka serves as the opening support.
Pre-performance hype for this monolithic event – the highest-attended concert run in history and the second-largest grossing event after Taylor Swift’s equally colossal The Eras Tour – is at such a level that you get the sense that Martin and company could effectively phone it in and still earn a place in local folklore. But you don’t become five-time Glastonbury headliners without the graft to match – and across a two-hour-plus show, Coldplay deliver on the promise of a full-production stadium spectacular, incongruously set against a sea of static caravans but still triumphantly felt.
Tipped marginally more towards kaleidoscopic colour-pop than post-Britpop torch tunes, this is nevertheless a showstopping affair packed to the gills with hits; any act who can throw out The Scientist and Viva la Vida in the first half-dozen songs clearly has the catalogue to spare.
Newer material like We Pray and My Universe make hook-friendly flirtations with atypical genre choices too, straddling hip-hop and k-pop; the EDM double-whammy of Something Just Like This and A Sky Full of Stars meanwhile proves transcendently euphoric.
Throughout, Martin hurtles down B-stages and C-stages, pinballing between fiery plumes and laser waves with relentlessly boyish elation. Similar to The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, any technical limitations as a vocalist are overwhelmed by his sheer magnetism and persona; when he conducts their now-infamous “kiss-cam” around the ground, serenading strangers with off-the-cuff ditties, his winningly charmed presence proves hard to resist.
As the soaring climax of Fix You sparks a showstopping finale, his smile lights up the whole city. “This has been one of the most amazing nights,” he proclaims. For Hull, it has been two in a million.