In further adventures working to woo the USA, Coldplay embarked on a round of ‘radio festivals’. These are something that doesn’t really happen in Europe. Radio stations having much more importance in the states means they can assemble a bill of huge bands and put them in front of a similarly huge audience.

No doubt there will have been some trepidation about whether the bill was suitable, but they’d played the Big Day Out festival in Australia – which had been headlined by Rammstein and Limp Bizkit – and that had gone very very well.
Sadly, things were very different here. Warming up the crowd for Staind, The Cult, Green Day and Incubus meant a crowd who were not only uninterested, but outright hostile.

Again, the band’s steadfast refusal to let ‘swimming against the tide’ get the better of them meant gritting their teeth and getting on with it. Looking back, one of the hardest things to handle must surely have been the fact that the festival took place across two days. Sitting under a hail of bottles containing god-knows-what must be bad enough. Doing it in the certain knowledge that you’d be on the very same stage experiencing the very same thing the following day is just unimagine-able.

This would be the point where legions of British bands before them would have turned tail, flicked the V’s at the USA for good and headed home. Coldplay were made of sterner stuff though and stuck it out. Slowly but surely, they won the USA over. Not before dodging their share of projectiles first, mind.

R42