Coldplay shine as recordbreaking tour comes home

Crowd-pandering, a lovingly eager frontman and a huge setlist in Hull prove they can still raise the bar before they take on their 10-show Wembley run, writes Roisin O’Connor

- By Roisin O’Connor

Chris Martin is the music industry's very own golden retriever: curly-haired, indefatigable, eager to please. The Coldplay frontman gambols around the stage at Hull's Craven Park as though it’s his first time off the leash. But stadiums are, in fact, his natural habitat and have been for over a decade - tonight, he and the rest of his band prove exactly why that is.

“This is our 212th concert out of 360,” he tells the crowd, flirting shamelessly: “Which to me basically means that we’ve had 211 rehearsals for Hull.”

Thankfully, this is the only flirting taking place on the big screen tonight. “Thank you for coming here after that debacle,” Martin jokes with one fan waving a sign that says they were in Boston last month - when a CEO was seemingly rumbled on the band’s “kiss cam” while in a clinch with his company’s HR officer. “We don’t want any more viral moments,” Martin later pleads.

Coldplay are one of the few acts today that can rival Taylor Swift and her globetrotting Eras tour. This is the first show (technically an underplay, just 20,000 of their closest fans) of the British pop band’s UK 2025 leg before they continue on a run of stadiums, including a record-breaking 10 nights at Wembley. It is genuinely staggering, when you remember that this tour has already passed through the UK on three occasions since 2022, including for their fifth Glastonbury headline slot in 2024. In that time, they’ve also released another album: