12 February 2001: The Fillmore,San Francisco, CA, USA
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Coldplay Shows Color of 'Parachutes'
The United Kingdom is home to 60 million people. Each of them, apparently, can write a killer melody.
Coldplay is the latest of those pesky Britpop bands that seem to form one day and seize their nation's undivided attention the next. After that they turn their considerable charms toward America, where world domination awaits.
The youthful members of Coldplay, recipients of three major nominations for the Brit Awards -- England's Grammys -- thrilled a reverent Fillmore crowd on Monday. With just one album to the band's credit, the divine "Parachutes," the set was short on material but plenty long on elegance.
Of the most recent British Invasion squadron, the bands Radiohead, Travis and Coldplay almost seem like brothers. If Radiohead is the irritable older boy, the one who went to art school but doesn't shy from a scrap, and Travis is the affable middle one, then Coldplay is the quiet youngest, the one with the gentlest, most endearing of souls.
(Ticket sellers outside were asking $50 apiece, and there were lots of glum faces who couldn't find an extra.) "I think that was worth the wait," lead singer Chris Martin said after finishing a song he'd cut short when his keyboard malfunctioned. He might as well have been talking about his band's first visit to the States.
With just the one album, the group padded its hour-plus set with some prerecorded music, including the entirety of "Waterfall," a decade-old song by the where-are-they-now Stone Roses, themselves once destined for Beatle-hood.
But Coldplay's own music was anything but padded. Martin's anguished voice slips effortlessly into a breathtaking falsetto, and he plays acoustic guitar with spare perfection. Guitarist Jon Buckland plays ringing, single-note leads,
endless haunting variations on the watery sound of the "Midnight Cowboy" theme. And the rhythm section, bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion, gives this otherwise ethereal experience a substantial bottom end.
After a decent, self-serious, arena-style opening set from Australian band Powderfinger, Coldplay set its melancholy stage with "Spies," a song that alternates Martin's lump-in-the-throat voice with overwhelming grand-scale instrumentation.
When the keyboard acted up, the singer returned to his guitar and led the band into "Shiver." That song, one of the most dizzying peaks on the record, drew wagging heads of approval. At one point Martin broke a guitar string, and it hung there, bathed in blue light.
One of a handful of the band's new songs, this one called "Animals," began with an icy click track that soon gave way to Champion's sure, steady drums. When Buckland played a furious fuzzed-out solo, Martin, again seated at the keyboard, couldn't control himself.
The band saved its breakthrough, the towering "Yellow," for near last. "Look at the stars/ Look how they shine for you," Martin cooed. Making it impossible to miss his point, he closed the show with an impromptu version of Burt Bacharach's "What the World Needs Now Is Love."
"I think this is the most wicked place we've ever played," Martin said of the Fillmore. Plenty of bands pander to the local audience like that. Few make it seem so sincere.
James Sullivan
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2001/02/14/DD68085.DTL&type=printable
