THE Q80 MIX

A Kuwaiti Blog For News, Tips and Reviews (and other interesting stuff!)

Hi everyone I’m back and I’m sure you can already tell where I’ve been this weekend. That’s right I went to Abu Dhabi to see Coldplay play live in concert.  I’m not really into concerts but Coldplay are one of the very few groups I’ve wanted to see live so I was really to glad get to good tickets, even though I thought I had left it late. All I can say is that they were FANTASTIC !  It was a memorable experience on so many levels.

We got into the outdoor venue at Emirates Palace about 20 minutes before Coldplay came on stage. The tickets were for standing near the stage (Diamond Standing) and I’m so glad I bought those tickets as the seated ones were really far away. I was looking around. The place was packed. I later found out that 15,000 people were there !

Then all of a sudden the lights went out and all you could see were torches of fire spinning around on the stage and then the opening intro from the album Viva La Vida (Life in Technicolor) being played by the band from behind a screen where you could only see their silhouettes. An electric opening.

The band then reeled off songs from the album with classics such as Yellow, In My Place and the brilliant Fix You in between. Oh and in between the songs there was thunderstorm which completely soaked everyone. But no one cared. In fact it added to the atmosphere. With every clap of thunder we sang even louder, our hands and faces getting wetter from the warm tropical rain. Coldplay was the perfect soundtrack to this evening.

But what made this concert really memorable was the performance of lead singer Chris Martin. What a show he put on. It wasn’t just him standing up there singing the songs going through the routine. His use of Arabic, “Shukran” and “keefik” were nice touches and you got the feeling that a lot of this was being improvised. Not the songs, the interaction with the crowd, which he never missed an opportunity to do. He would bring in “raindrops keep falling on my head” in one of his songs while the rain was bucketing down. When doing a rendition of the 60’s song of “I’m  a believer” he cracked a joke each time before asking different sections of the crowd and the band members  if they”feel in love”.

Check out the clip from the fantastic goosebump performance of ‘Fix You’.  Chris Martin let the crowd do most of the singing and you get an idea of the some of the improvised lines he sang about the rain:

Other great parts of the show were when celebrating Earth Hour, all the lights were turned off as Chris Martin asked everyone to light up the screens of their mobiles while he sang  on a small stage in the middle of the crowd. Before that, one lucky girl who was celebrating her birthday actually got on the stage with Chris Martin where they did a “special duet” as Martin put it. Only he would sing but asked if she wouldn’t mind turning the pages of the song book on his piano. But joke of the night had to be when he said that the band has been together for 13 years but the first 12 years were just spent practicing for this concert in Abu Dhabi LOL !

Back to the music, so many good songs were performed really well but the pick were Lost, Clocks (great laser show), Viva La Vida,  and of course Fix You. But what made this show (it was so much more than a concert) so refreshing was that the biggest band in the world right now are really down to earth ordinary guys who play great music, fantastic songs and always engaged the audience.

I arrived at the concert liking Coldplay. I left, absolutely loving them.

Will leave you with this clip of Coldplay performing Viva La Vida which  gives more of a close up of  how the show looked.

(Special mention to Z for letting me know about the concert in the first place! I’m so glad you did.Thanks !)