Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Coldplay Tickets-Remaining Shows

Coldplay Tickets 9/1 Thursday 7:00 PM Darien Lake Performing Arts Center in Darien Center, NY
Coldplay Tickets 9/3 Saturday 7:00 PM PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ
Coldplay Tickets 9/6 Tuesday 7:30 PM Madison Square Garden in New York , NY
Coldplay Tickets 9/7 Wednesday 7:30 PM Madison Square Garden in New York , NY
Coldplay Tickets 9/9 Friday 7:00 PM Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre (NC) in Charlotte, NC
Coldplay Tickets 9/10 Saturday 7:00 PM Alltel Pavilion at Walnut Creek in Raleigh, NC
Coldplay Tickets 9/13 Tuesday 7:00 PM Sound Advice Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, FL
Coldplay Tickets 9/14 Wednesday 7:00PM Ford Amphitheatre At the Florida State Fairgrounds (Formerly Tampa Bay Amphitheatre) in Tampa, FL
Coldplay Tickets 9/16 Friday 7:00 PM Verizon Wireless Music Center in Pelham, AL
Coldplay Tickets 9/17 Saturday 7:00 PM UMB Bank Pavilion in Maryland Heights, MO
Coldplay Tickets 9/18 Sunday 7:00 PM Starwood Amphitheatre in Nashville, TN
Coldplay Tickets 9/20 Tuesday 7:00 PM Target Center in Minneapolis, MN
Coldplay Tickets 9/21 Wednesday 7:00 PM Verizon Wireless Amphitheater KC in Bonner Springs, KS
Coldplay Tickets 9/23 Friday 7:00 PM Smirnoff Music Centre in Dallas, TX
Coldplay Tickets 9/24 Saturday 8:00 PM Woodlands Pavilion in Spring, TX
Coldplay Tickets 9/28 Wednesday 7:00 PM Philips Arena in Atlanta, GA
Coldplay Tickets 9/29 Thursday 7:00 PM Verizon Wireless Virginia Beach Amphitheater in Virginia Beach, VA
Coldplay Tickets 9/30 Friday7 :00 PM Nissan Pavilion in Bristow, VA

Monday, August 29, 2005

Coldplay pulls out big guns in Phoenix concert

Coldplay have made no secret that they hope to eventually become as huge as Ireland’s U2, and Thursday’s concert by the former at Cricket Pavilion in Phoenix had the feel of a “big event.”

Coldplay has graduated from the Dodge Theatre (the last venue the quartet played in Phoenix), and its high-dollar video presentation and lighting array put it into a new league.

Taking the stage in dramatic fashion on a sweaty Valley night, with its members silhouetted again a huge LED clock counting down to liftoff, pianist-singer Chris Martin & Co. took immediate control of the huge crowd (18,000-plus) with a flawless take on “Square One,” the opening track on the band’s latest album, “X&Y.”

“You’re in control, is there anywhere you wanna go?” Martin sang to the audience, which responded with a roar that translated to, “Down the hit-filled road that has turned this group into multimillionaires.”

Martin, now a father after his marriage to actress Gwyneth Paltrow, quickly made it clear that he’s got U2’s Bono is his sights. But the Coldplay front man has a way to go before he catches the world’s most magnetic rock singer.

Martin has become much more animated onstage, often leaving the security of the upright piano that he’s banged on since the band debuted with 2000’s “Parachutes” album.

Grabbing the microphone, he danced across the stage, reaching for the sky and making other dramatic hand gestures. Martin has learned a trick or two from Bono and Jagger in the art of playing larger venues. Overpowering strobe lights and mirror-image videos of the band combined to provide sensory overload for the audience as Coldplay moved into “Politik,” from 2002’s masterful “A Rush of Blood to the Head” album.

The sight of Martin leaning over his keyboard, rocking on his stool and singing with closed eyes has become one of the more endearing in rock. He may be a huge star now, but he remains dedicated to the music that got his band where it is.

Backed by power chords from guitarist Jon Buckland on the band’s early breakthrough hit, “Yellow,” Martin demonstrated that he’s still focused on material he’s played 1,000 times. Playing electric guitar, the black-clad singer’s delivery of the well-trodden song’s lyrics was dead-on.

Only the dropping of confetti-filled yellow balloons at song’s end seemed overly calculated.
Coldplay deftly moved through the first half of its 110-minute set, pulling out lasers and “Star Wars”–like space imagery for this year’s “Speed of Sound” and adding aggression to the guitar work in 2002’s “God Put a Smile Upon Your Face.”

Martin threw in some self-effacing humor when he introduced “Everything’s Not Lost” by claiming that a survey in a woman’s magazine revealed that “Coldplay is best viewed from far away,” adding that “some of us are a bit fat, some of us are a bit ugly.”

Gazing toward the throng behind the reserved seating, Martin said, “So if you bought yourself a lawn ticket and sat far away from us … everything is not lost.”

As the concert progressed, it became evident that Martin was being a trooper in spite of apparently having a cold or else being run down from this major North American tour.
His voice started to sound a bit ragged at the end of “Everything’s Not Lost,” but the adoring crowd was happy to pitch in on the chorus when requested.

Martins vocals were flat in places on the mega-hit “Clocks,” and he skipped some high notes on “Talk,” which closed the band’s initial set, which was followed by a three-song encore.
Coldplay tipped its hand regarding U2 envy a little too strongly on three songs – “Low,” “White Shadows” and “Talk,” all from “X&Y.” The driving bass of Guy Berryman and Buckland’s soaring guitar mirrored Coldplay’s Irish predecessor too close for comfort on those tracks.
Coldplay revealed another of its idols during a short acoustic set, when the band played “Till Kingdom Come,” the hidden track on “X&Y” that Martin said was written in tribute to the late country-music icon Johnny Cash.

That led into a version of Cash’s “Ring of Fire” that was well-intentioned but quite proper. Nonetheless, the desert-dwelling crowd shouted its approval.

All in all, Coldplay’s live show remains energetic and enjoyable.

But the band needs another album or two and a few more world tours under its belt before Bono and U2 have to look over their shoulder.

Source: http://www.azcentral.com

Monday, August 22, 2005

Coldplay-Remaining Shows

Coldplay Tickets 8/25 Cricket Pavilion in Phoenix, AZ

Coldplay Tickets 8/26 Friday 7:00 PM Coors Amphitheatre -CA in Chula Vista, CA


Coldplay Tickets 8/30 Tuesday 7:00 PM DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston, MI


Coldplay Tickets 8/31 Wednesday 7:30 PM Germain Amphitheatre (Formerly Polaris) in Columbus, OH Coldplay Tickets 9/1

Coldplay Tickets 9/1 Thursday 7:00 PM Darien Lake Performing Arts Center in Darien Center, NY


Coldplay Tickets 9/3 Saturday 7:00 PM PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ


Coldplay Tickets 9/6 Tuesday 7:30 PM Madison Square Garden in New York , NY


Coldplay Tickets 9/7 Wednesday 7:30 PM Madison Square Garden in New York , NY


Coldplay Tickets 9/9 Friday 7:00 PM Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre (NC) in Charlotte, NC


Coldplay Tickets 9/10 Saturday 7:00 PM Alltel Pavilion at Walnut Creek in Raleigh, NC


Coldplay Tickets 9/13 Tuesday 7:00 PM Sound Advice Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, FL


Coldplay Tickets 9/14 Wednesday 7:00PM Ford Amphitheatre At the Florida State Fairgrounds (Formerly Tampa Bay Amphitheatre) in Tampa, FL


Coldplay Tickets 9/16 Friday 7:00 PM Verizon Wireless Music Center in Pelham, AL


Coldplay Tickets 9/17 Saturday 7:00 PM UMB Bank Pavilion in Maryland Heights, MO


Coldplay Tickets 9/18 Sunday 7:00 PM Starwood Amphitheatre in Nashville, TN


Coldplay Tickets 9/20 Tuesday 7:00 PM Target Center in Minneapolis, MN


Coldplay Tickets 9/21 Wednesday 7:00 PM Verizon Wireless Amphitheater KC in Bonner Springs, KS


Coldplay Tickets 9/23 Friday 7:00 PM Smirnoff Music Centre in Dallas, TX


Coldplay Tickets 9/24 Saturday 8:00 PM Woodlands Pavilion in Spring, TX


Coldplay Tickets 9/28 Wednesday 7:00 PM Philips Arena in Atlanta, GA


Coldplay Tickets 9/29 Thursday 7:00 PM Verizon Wireless Virginia Beach Amphitheater in Virginia Beach, VA


Coldplay Tickets 9/30 Friday7 :00 PM Nissan Pavilion in Bristow, VA

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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Saturday, August 20, 2005

Coldplay at the Shoreline-Largest Coldplay Concert Ever

Friday's concert at the Shoreline Amphitheatre marked a turning point for Coldplay, and three songs into the British band's set, singer-songwriter Chris Martin paused to capture the moment.
"I've just been told that this is our biggest show ever, and if everyone here had voted for us we would have won 'American Idol,' " he quipped before turning to his piano to sing "Trouble" a track off of 1999's "The Blue Room" EP. By song's end, half the amphitheater was singing along.
Referencing the band's new popularity before playing an old favorite was a telling gesture. Since releasing its Grammy-winning second album, "A Rush of Blood to the Head," last year, Coldplay's stateside following has swelled from a devoted fan base to a broader mainstream audience that missed its brilliant (also Grammy-winning) debut, 2000's "Parachutes."
The quartet is now a radio staple; "A Rush of Blood" has gone platinum; Martin is dating Gwyneth Paltrow (at least it's not Winona). At Shoreline, the crowd boasted a trans-cultural melange of indie kids, older prog-rockers and fresh converts who discovered the band through their local modern-rock stations.

Is good fortune a bad thing? Not for Martin, who repeatedly marveled at the size of the audience and venue. But for veteran Coldplay fans, who have watched their group move from relatively intimate sets at Bimbo's and the Fillmore to the Greek Theatre and finally the 20,000-capacity Shoreline, this transition from inspired underdogs to rock stars probably carries a bittersweet aftertaste.

Yet the progression is as fitting as it is fortunate. Coldplay's expansive sound, in which even piano ballads seem built for cathedral recitals, is perfectly suited to huge venues, and on Friday it effortlessly filled the amphitheater's sprawling space.

If Coldplay's 90-minute performance felt rote after a year of touring, it still sounded magnificent. The band kicked off with its standard opener, "Politik," a classic Coldplay arrangement in which hushed, confessional verses ignite into choruses of Wagnerian scale. The loud-soft dynamic worked well on "A Rush of Blood to the Head" and "Don't Panic," and reached its pinnacle with "God Put a Smile Upon Your Face." Starting as an acoustic ballad, the song built into a symphony of acid-rock distortion and soaring, bittersweet vocals as Martin cut loose to dance across the stage with his guitar.

Whether hunkering at the piano or whirling in circles like an ecstatic dervish, Martin has developed a stage presence kinetic enough to reach the lawn seats. His keening vocals fill the music with soulful veracity, whether toning down the treacle in "Everything's Not Lost" to create an inspirational anthem or adding a melancholic touch to the lilting melody of "The Scientist." On the neo-psychedelic "Daylight," Martin even managed to make verses extolling sunshine sound dark as lead guitarist Jon Buckland wove through Eastern-tinged riffs.
At times Coldplay's lavish sound echoed early U2, particularly on the mid- tempo "One I Love" and the new song "Moses"; at others, particularly in the lush dream pop of its first hit single, "Yellow," it recalled the band's days at the vanguard of Brit-pop's second wave. Coldplay has found that rare middle ground between accessibility and complex musicianship: Exchanges between guitars and piano shifted the music's mood and texture, while bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion created a rhythmic backdrop that provided a booming, danceable vibe.

The encore included the ubiquitous "Clocks" and "In My Place," still powerful and achingly beautiful after a thousand airplays. Dedicating the night's final number, the piano tune "Amsterdam," "to my lady and my dad," Martin told the crowd, "We thought there's no way we can be a soft rock band with short hair. We've proved that we can."

They've proved more than that -- among other things, that a gifted and adventurous rock group can enjoy mainstream success without whoring its talent.

We might never see them play Bimbo's again, but witnessing Coldplay's uncompromised success is a fair trade.

By Neva Chonin-SF Chronicle

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Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Coldplay Concert Update

Coldplay with Black MountainFriday, Aug. 12 Verizon Wireless Music Center
Chris Martin and some dudes turned in a larger-than-life show that was both incrementally exhilarating and pointedly manufactured at Verizon Wireless last Friday. Having only just released their critically polarizing third record, X&Y, in June, it’s evident that this little U.K. band that could, has, but may have gotten too big for their knickers in the process.

Chris Martin of Coldplay last week at Verizon Wireless Music Center
The Good …What made this an indelible show despite the new, diluted material was the excellent visual staging of the show. Simple design elements of light and color (also elemental in their last expansive U.S. tour for 2002’s A Rush of Blood to the Head) made for a larger-than-life tableau. (It resembled the panoramic screen of red light in the Foo Fighters’ video for “All My Life.”) The older material featured on the setlist not only held up, but still breathed deeply with original, organic verve intact. The sweet gospel-like goodness of “Everything’s Not Lost” amplified to the size of Noblesville made the disappointment of the new songs evaporate almost instantly in the evening’s humidity.
The Bad …The tone was instantly marred during the second song, “Politik,” with blatant, choreographed pandering to the locals, including name checking the Colts in the lyrics of one line and then: “This is a concert you cannot miss, it’s Coldplay in India-napo-liiiissss!” Fashion mallers screamed excitedly on cue while alienated hipsters shuddered at the contrived, cheesy maneuver. The new songs, juxtaposed with the older ones, sat on top like the slick grime that rises to the street surface at the beginning of a rainstorm. This was best exemplified by “Speed of Sound,” the first single from the album, whose best component is the fluid melody of the verses (only to downgrade into a weak chorus) and “The Hardest Part,” a tune resembling a discarded U2 B-side. To further connect the dots to U2, Martin’s banter, unchanged from the last tour, is rife with ego and regularly chased with Bono-style feigned humility: “Thank you for letting us come to your city and play for you.” (Read: “And for being suckers enough to spend $80 for pavilion.”)
The Opener … The Canadian-based outfit Black Mountain is not for those looking for a two-minute pop fix. They mingle the expressive, melodic swell of Mogwai with bluesy psychedelic rock. The set was highlighted by the dark, spacey ’70s guitar riffs of “Don’t Run Our Hearts Around,” adorned with ghostly vocals and the angular indulgence of Pink Floyd. The set ended with the addition of a couple of execs from their label Jagjaguwar and Secretly Canadian Records coming on stage to add a little instrumentation. This is too interesting a band to be properly absorbed in a large setting; it’s too cinematic, too suggestive. Although the finer points of subtlety and detail were obscured in the open air of the amphitheater, it was a strong step up to the radar of the 20,000-strong audience. Not a bad way to be introduced, really.

To read this article by Danic Johnson, click here