Mel and I went to see Coldplay with our friends Mike and April this past Saturday night. We didn’t bring our camera since there were none allowed. But, then we hear them saying to everyone in line: “no professional cameras allowed”… which explains why so many people has point-and-shoots. Flickr’er charlespham seems to have quite an abundant set of photos from the show. Even if we did have our camera, nothing would have looked good from the lawn seats, so I wasn’t upset at that.
The opening act was Black Mountain, and they sounded like they were really influenced by Deep Purple-era rock. We didn’t pay much attention to them. During the break, Melanie needed to use the ladies room. 10 minutes later, so did I (we were the only ones drinking beer). When I got back, Melanie was not back yet… and soon after that, Coldplay came on. I was standing facing away from the stage, uphill, waiting for her to come walking through the crowd. After the 2nd song I went to go look for her. She went to the 2nd beer stand from the end, not the 2nd beer stand from the bathrooms. So, she was looking for us in the wrong area. I found her and we were able to enjoy the rest of the show together!
The band didn’t seem to have played a long set… but, that could have been because I was looking for Melanie the first 20 minutes. Chris Martin was very active, covering the entire stage over the course of their set. During the encore, he even ran up into the crowd and sang from atop the sound booth, interacting with the fans. They had this huge, wide jumbo-tron screen that was part of their set… behing the stage. A bit hard to see at times due to our location being so high up in the lawn section. They displayed various graphics and lights on this screen, but also used it to show close ups of the band. This gigantic display was big enough to show a close up of all four band members at once, so it was much better than your standard jumbo-tron screen at a concert.
One thing I thought was great… once their encore was doen, the band walked around the stage, waving and thanking the audience. Then the took a collective bow and left the stage. Something that I have not seen too often at a concert. Overall, a great show, but definitely want to get closer seats next time.
