02 June 2003: Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, USA
From WikiColdplay
Setlist
- Politik
- God Put A Smile Upon Your Face
- A Rush Of Blood To The Head
- Daylight
- Trouble
- One I Love
- Don’t Panic
- Moses
- Everything’s Not Lost
- Pour Me
- Yellow
- The Scientist
- What A Wonderful World
Encore - Clocks
- In My Place
- Amsterdam
- The World Turned Upside Down
Reviews
Coldplay's concert June 2 at the Hollywood Bowl clearly showed that this is a band better seen in an intimate setting. Or at least from the front 20 rows.
While Coldplay clearly is a band comfortable playing before 12,000-seat venues such as this, the reach of the band does not yet extend to the back of the house.
For those with seats in the nosebleeds, it was hard to hear the ballad-heavy band over disinterested people chattering away or concertgoers warbling Chris Martin's vocals. Martin even made a wry comment to "the folks in the back...two miles away," which showed he empathized with those in the cheap seats. Those fans also weren't helped by terminally out-of-focus video cameras projecting onto tiny screens that barely enlarged the size of the band.
Being the latest rage among Brit-rock bands, Coldplay is still adjusting its stage presence to accommodate their newfound fame. While Martin is as energetic onstage as REM's Michael Stipe was back in that band's halcyon days, the remainder of the group stays true to English Shoegazer roots of bands such as Echo and The Bunnymen.
As a result, when Martin is shackled to his piano for his soulful ballads, the band is relatively static, which does little to energize the audience. But once Martin breaks away to sing or join in his distortion-wracked rhythm guitar, his manic energy changes the mood considerably.
It didn't help that Martin's voice was not at its strongest on this night. Playing a Satuday/Monday gig in LA is always a dicey affair, and it appeared that Martin may have enjoyed too much nightlife over the weekend. Several times his falsetto cracked, and he was forced to retreat to his more comfortable tenor range for passages normally sung at higher octaves.
The sound board crew had problems with guitars dropping out of the mix when both Martin and lead guitarist Jon Buckland were playing. The legendary acoustics of the Hollywood Hills also distorted drummer Will Champion's playing, with significant bounceback from the snare drum and cymbals.
Whatever sonic problems the band had were made up for by Martin's interaction with the audience. While some British bands (read: Oasis) are notorious for arrogance and distance onstage, Martin willingly embraced the crowd. He even took several cross-cultural risks, such as giving support to the Dixie Chicks (met with polite applause). He also said if fans didn't like the show, they could ask for their money back, or to sue the band, "because that's what you Americans do."
Only a performer in tune with his audience might take such dares. Then again, Coldplay is a band still on the upswing, and its fans are ravenous and loyal early adopters waiting for The Big Break so they can say "I was there when..." To paraphrase Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon during that band's heyday, they could have passed wind into the microphone and received cheers.
The set itself was not a Greatest Hits list -- in fact, core songs such as "Shiver" were left out in favor of B-sides and unreleased tracks. Perhaps that's one way a young band keeps from becoming prematurely jaded from endless shouted requests for breakthrough songs such as "Yellow" and "Clocks," which provided the climax of the show. But for long stretches of the concert, only the hardcore fans were familiar what was being played, and Martin strayed dangerously close to losing the jaded LA audience with some of the lesser-known numbers.
Perhaps the saving grace of the show was a dynamic light show that ranged from pin-spots dancing about the stage, to the inside of the bowl being illuminated with an almost-waterlike miasma. The acoustic balls that hang from the the bowl's shell received separate illumination, looking like an angry Martian surface or an icy Neptunian moon. However, the lighting crew had no compunction with repeatedly blinding the crowd with blistering spots that had one concertgoer muttering, "This is what a migraine is like."
Perhaps Coldplay has grown out of reading concert reviews, but one might be tempted to note that Monday's concert was longer than the preceding Saturday's set at the Bowl. That first LA show had been mocked by the Los Angeles Times for only lasting 90 minutes, and the band was lambasted for having too thin a musicology to play an extended set.
Perhaps to counter that notion, Coldplay rocked through an extra encore, consisting of an untitled song the band allegedly had written that day. While in the same soft-loud-soft genre such as other new tracks like "Moses" and "Poor Me," the song was expectedly ragged for a first-time performance. But at its core, it was a strong new piece, showing Coldplay to be ready to take the next big step. Now the band only needs to embrace the stage presence and amplification to embrace it.
-30- (Mark R.)
