Review-Coldplay at the Shoreline

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A few bars into "God Put a Smile Upon Your Face," Chris Martin stopped the music and invited the sold-out crowd at Shoreline Amphitheatre to approach the stage. "It feels more like a proper concert, less like a convention," he explained, adding, "Please don't kill yourselves, or we'll be in terrible trouble."

There was little danger of that; Coldplay's audience is a well-behaved lot, as befits a band that's made classy, ballad-based rock a new radio staple. Many in the Shoreline crowd, in fact, were old enough to be the band's parents. The Brit-pop fans who formed Coldplay's base five years ago were scarce, and the parking lots overflowed with family-size sedans and SUVs.

No surprise. Coldplay, onetime darlings of the pop elite, is officially mainstream. Is that a bad thing? The band's latest album, "X & Y," has filled airwaves with some of the most gorgeous and seductive rock we've heard in decades. The sound is commercial without being crass; it aches with good intentions. But it's also miles from rock's earthy roots, sharing more common ground with a composer like John Williams than Muddy Waters. And, as the Shoreline show demonstrated, regardless of how sincerely delivered, it can border on sterility.

With its rich ballads and arena-sized anthems, this is a group made to reverberate in large spaces like Shoreline. This needn't exclude spontaneity, though, which Coldplay sometimes seems to forget. The North American tour's fixed set list should have allowed Martin and his band to at least improvise their stage patter, rather than repeating the same quips in every city. While performing "A Rush of Blood to the Head," for instance, Martin has made a ritual of following the lyric "I'm gonna buy this place and start a fire" with the assurance, "Not this place, obviously." It was probably amusing the first time.

Conversational impediments aside, Martin's music is beautiful, and on Friday Coldplay delivered it well. The 110-minute set began with the new CD's opening track, "Square One," then moved into "Politik," the first track from 2002's "A Rush of Blood to the Head" (during which Martin gave requisite shout- outs to Berkeley and San Francisco, where he said the band had spent the past week.)

Piano ballads ("Everything's Not Lost," "Swallowed in the Sea") alternated with epic rock numbers ("Speed of Sound," a rowdy version of "Clocks"), as Martin alternated between playing keyboards and guitar and dancing across the stage. The majestic crescendos of "Fix You" and "Talk" were the highlights of the evening, while a trio of acoustic numbers swung between sublime and labored. "Kingdom Come," written for the late Johnny Cash, was classic romanticism to which Cash would have added noble, battered grit; but Martin's cover of Cash's "Ring of Fire" was the sonic equivalent of Wonder Bread. Martin is a talented songwriter and can invade my radio space anytime -- but he, sir, is no Johnny Cash.

Still, Martin is a sensitive guy, and sensitive guys are as rare as ragged geniuses in the rock world. He lavished shout-outs on fans stuck in the nosebleed lawn seating (even though he might have better served their needs if overhead video screens had concentrated less on special effects and more on the performers). Kind gestures abounded: Balloons were released onto the lawn for the old hit "Yellow"; during "In My House," Martin left the stage to serenade those on the upper level. Most impressively, where most bands of Coldplay's stature institute Draconian searches to prevent illegal photography (although this is increasingly futile in an age of phone cameras), Coldplay encouraged concertgoers to take pictures. During "Low," band members photographed the crowd themselves.

It was sweet, if rehearsed. Before the Cash tribute, Martin asked that the venue lights be turned up again so he could get a good look at 20,000 of his closest fans. "Holy s -- , we've turned into Bon Jovi," he marveled. The line is still a joke. What a pity if it turns into a premonition.

By Neva Chonin-SF Chronicle

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