So following the previous blog’s discussion of Chris’s new stadium transport, soundcheck today begins with the band arriving each of them on their own scooter.
The four of them head off down the ramp to the B-Stage. With typical roadie optimism the entire attendant crew discuss how long it is before someone has their leg in plaster and end up doing a show in a Dave Grohl throne.
The wheels are discarded and soundcheck proper begins. They blast through a favourite from my first tour in 2002 and move on to something from *way* back in the early days – from when they were playing in the backrooms of Camden pubs to crowds made up of their friends.
Predictably, nobody can remember exactly how it goes, but each of them seem to remember different bits sufficiently that between the four of them they can make it to the end of the tune.
Whether it makes it into the show – or if it is simply a bit of fun – is unclear. You have to wonder, though, what the four young men they were when they wrote the song would have made of the scene today.
It’s about as idyllic a scene of high-level stadium touring as you can imagine. There is barely a cloud in the sky and the whole touring machine is ticking along pleasantly.
Maybe the young Coldplay would have scoffed at such ‘bigness’ – after all, globe-conquering stadium extravaganzas would hardly have fit the indie mindset they had at the time. You have to suspect, though, that quietly they always thought, “Yeah – but what if everything *does* go right?”.
On a very regular basis, ideas get floated by the band to be met pragmatically by the crew with, “Yes, but this might go wrong – and this might happen – and it might not actually work out that well”. The guys’ steadfast and consistent response tends to be, “Yeah, but what if it’s great? – we’ve got to at least try it.”
I’m pretty sure that this spirit has run through the entire history of the band – even from the very germ of the idea in each of them saying, “I’m going to move to London and start a band”.
It’s easy to forget that simple ideas can slip through life’s net of complications and become wildly wonderful things. Watching them playing the song they wrote in their earliest days in this environment brings that point home pretty strongly.
Sometimes it’s the oddest little things that remind you you’re in the middle of something pretty cool.
R42
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