Coldplay Concert (part II)

There we were, in our seats at the Energy Solutions Arena at 7:30. I’d been to once concert before (Collective Soul at Brainshare ‘08) but never a *real* concert that you buy tickets for. 7:30 hit and Sleepercar, the opening act, hit the stage. They were decent, however nothing spectacular. It seemed more like they were giving the techies time to test all their equipment and get situated for the rest of the show to begin. 8:00 rolled around, still no Coldplay. Sleepercar had left the stage and a new act was assembling. It was a guy with two macbooks, a screen, and a projector. He fired things up and started to introduce the audience to what an acid trip was like. No joke. He improvised techno music from loops and paired it with video footage of cartoons, but the colors were all over the place and psychadelic. I’ve never seen something so truly disturbing in my life. The music and images progressively went off the deep end, going first from strange looped cartoons timed to the music straight into dolls that metamorphosized into people that then started to lose limbs…it was really weird. Christie, Mikayla, and I started looking at the ceiling, taking pictures, and otherwise distracting ourselves from the disturbing performance which lasted for a whole 45 minutes! It took FOREVER! Finally he wrapped it up and the techies started rearranging things for the concert to actually get going. The seats next to us had been unoccupied until now, when two couples arrived swigging beer and wearing University of Utah apparel (John, who was thoroughly in ecstasy over the results of the match, was subdued that evening when I told him we sat next to Utes at the concert. “YEahh!! WOOOO!”, said John “They were punch drunk,” said I. He wound down after that). I had felt it prudent to not wear my cougar apparel to the concert and this inclination proved to be of merit.

Finally, after two hours of decent warm-up band and a nightmare of audiovisual LSD, the lights went out and you could hear in the background (over the din of the crowd) the opening sound of Life in Technicolor, the first track on the Viva la Vida album. It’s instrumental, but very distinct and up-beat. You can’t help but feel good listening to it. The forms of band members could be seen in the darkness as they took the stage, all while the album cover began to appear on the screen behind the entire stage (Probably about 60 feet tall). When the pre-recorded background track hit the part where the guitars, drum, and accent vocals take their cues, the lights came up on each in turn and the concert started. They rolled from that track into Violet Hill and the rest of the album. I don’t remember the entire order they went in, as they skipped around a lot. They also played some stuff from past albums (God put a smile on your face, The Scientist, Clocks (very cool light show for that one), Politik, Fix You, and Yellow as an encore). It was absolutely amazing, every minute of it. Even in spite of the (wie sagt mann…) highly inappropriate behavior that was rampant in the seats next to ours. Some of the highlights: the lighting was amazing, hands down, including lasers, good use of smoke, precision instruments, and well cued hits with the music and lights in sync. Chris Martin is an excellent performer and entertainer. Although he probably didn’t do anything different that night than anywhere else, it felt like he was coming up with stuff on the spot (improving Violet Hill at the end, “If you’re from Utah won’t you let me know!” and giving away harmonicas in the crowd to some of the kids). Strawberry Swing had a really great light show as well. The coolest part of it all was Lovers in Japan. Taking cues from their music video for that track, they had millions (not an exaggeration) of paper butterflies that blew out of the top of the stadium and rained down on everything during the chorus. The last batch was fluorescent and they switched on blacklights to make it that much neater (Check out the pictures at planetbrent-photos.juicydevelopment.com for the details).

The photos describe the details of the concert very well. Ultimately, it was absolutely fantastic. We left the concert in short order, didn’t have trouble with traffic, drove home safely, and I think the entire experience was unforgettable for everyone. It was a blast.