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COLDPLAY
PICTURE PERFECT
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Chris Martin wears his guitar a bit too high. And I had to wince when he inserted "Let me play in Massachusetts" into the yearning "Politik," the second song of an otherwise picture-perfect set Coldplay humbly delivered to a capacity crowd of more than 19,000 at the Tweeter Center on Saturday. Martin and his band have spent plenty of time on the top of the charts since their first single, "Yellow," made them the hottest thing to come out of Britain since Radiohead five years ago. And having overcome the Thom Yorke shyness that afflicted Martin on their first US tour, Coldplay were already at the top of their game as a club band when they returned to support 2002’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. But with the release of the anthemic X&Y (Capitol) back in June, they were catapulted into a new realm of the pop universe, and the Martin who graciously greeted a well-behaved audience of moms and dads, girlfriends and boyfriends, parents and kids, was on top of the world Saturday night. "Everybody okay so far?" he asked after sprinting back and forth from his piano to both sides of the stage during a soul-searching "Speed of Sound." Later, after the selfless "The Hardest Part," he thanked everyone for "being so nice" and, having already checked in with the folks up on the lawn, dedicated the next tune to anyone listening from the parking lot. If there were awards for nicest guys in rock or most self-effacing frontman, Coldplay would be hands down favorites. And given the larger platform of the Tweeter Center stage, the overbearing gestures of the Avalon show the band played a couple weeks before X&Y’s release seemed modest in retrospect. Martin worked his way from the back of the stage, where he stood in silhouette against a giant PopMart-style backscreen, to center stage, where he chatted with band mates, played down his stardom (and marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow) with quips like "How did a singer like me end up with an actress like that?", and joked about his inability to improvise. The band, unshaven in basic black, may have dressed down, but there was plenty of eye candy: the giant yellow balloons filled with yellow confetti that descended during "Yellow," the million-dollar laser-light show that illuminated the audience as often as the band, and, in a clever pomo twist worthy of U2’s text-messaging ploy, an audience photo-op that encouraged the crowd to "Get your cameras ready" in bold letters on the hi-def screen that was then lit up with images of people taking pictures of themselves taking pictures of the band. Now if only someone could persuade Martin to let a little slack out on that guitar strap.
Matt Ashare
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