The concert from Monday night has still been winding through my head steadily throughout this week.  It’s sometimes hard to focus when the music is still playing and the lightshow is still shining.  In some ways I’m super-distracted a lot and I think it’s funny that a band is doing it to me.

A friend Peter Onate asked me tonight whether it was the best concert I’d ever been to.  I quickly replied “yes!” Afterwards I thought about it a bit more and I think it’s really hard to answer that question because concerts are so different!  The Switchfoot concert last year was awesome because we were really close to the stage actually and it was a fun time.  What else have I been to…. I can’t recall.  The Coldplay concert was epic because I knew all the songs, knew many of the words, and wanted to see how they did it live.  But I have to say, when you compare a live concert with the live experience from a music DVD it’s really hard to state which is better.

At a concert you have usually one vantage point and that is what it’s like for 2 hours.  You resign yourself to that position.  You decide to enjoy it for all its worth from right there.  You dance it up on the spot, you look around, you wish they were closer, or you wish you could feel the enormity of the whole arena (if you are much closer).  In a DVD, you have professionally mixed sound, multiple viewpoints, and close proximity at some angles.  You can get totally into it but I don’t ever find myself jumping up and down while watching a live DVD.  It’s not the same.

Furthermore, having done live sound, lighting, and video, I have a perspective that might be insanely unrealistic.  That is, I dream of lighting arrangements.  And expect concerts to rival my imagination.  And even the largest bands are limited in their ability to put on a light show.

An amazing concert should plunge people fully into the music through the atmosphere and the visuals.  It’s pretty lame when a concert simply has the performers standing there and performing.  Well, maybe let’s even make a distinction between concerts and shows.  I would likely be quite excited about a concert where the performers are so talented they could just sit there or stand there and play and everyone would be amazed (a la John Mayer, Phil Keaggy, Kid Koala to name a few).  Coldplay doesn’t just do concerts, they do SHOWS.

It was great to see the globey lights suspending and still be really intrigued by them.  They could light up and change colours and even project video inside them.  There were points when the live camera footage would display in the globey lights.  It amazed me actually to see different footage on the side screens, back of stage sreen, and the globey lights all at the same time.  Sometimes it was live camera, sometimes related video (eg. video and images from Japan during “Lovers in Japan”), sometimes just decorations (eg. Viva logo, Delacroix painting).  If they didn’t have live camera footage I would have been quite disappointed since I was so far away from the stage.  This brought the band much closer.  (note: they didn’t film this show for any kind of live DVD evidently because of all the kinds of cameras used — they were mainly huge depth of field kind of lenses and cameras)

Two songs from Viva La Vida really got people really pumped: “Viva La Vida” and “Lovers in Japan”.  “Viva” got everyone pumped simply because of its poppy and catchy rhythm and melody.  That song was obviously written to be performed live…  with the “whoa whoaoooh” part for the crowd to sing while Chris Martin sang the chorus; with its pulsing strings.  In some ways, during the concert I really didn’t care whether it was very tracked with non-live instruments because I was just so excited!  In my section not too many were standing up but when Viva started pumping, I shouted to my friends and got them to stand up.  Even after that there were still people sitting around us, some only getting up for the rousing bridge part (with the whoa whoaoohs).  “Lovers in Japan” was just made to be truly epic because at the beginning of each round of the chorus, millions of small paper butterflies sprayed and drifted from the lighting racks at the top of the roof.  It glittered like mad and it made the song just so amazing.  The lights flashed to the pounding of the beats and it was just so full.  My video in my previous post shows a lot of this.  The funny thing is, I looked down at the sound guys and they had these little canopies they would unroll as the butterflies came pouring down to protect the sound boards from being littered with confetti-like things.  The sound guys would blow away the butterflies and then hide under the meshing and control the dials and faders from under!  Well thought through!

Another song that got the whole crowd together was “Fix You”.  I’m not sure why, but everyone really loves that song.  Chris Martin describes it as unpoetic and raw.  I think that’s what people love about it.  It’s raw.  It’s bare.  The emotion isn’t hidden by any uninterpretable symbolism.  Everyone understands the song: something has gone wrong and you’re trying to make it right again.  So everyone sings along.  The song clearly moves from the lone voice of Chris Martin to the chorus of community near the end when the whole band sings and invites everyone to join in.  “Fix You” cuts to the deepest parts of our souls.

Unfortunately the band ended with “Yellow” which I think isn’t really one of their best songs (although it seems to be their most cherished and popular).  They only did that one song for the encore.  I wish it had been a more musical and engaging song than that one.

It seems other bands will have a high bar to match.  I wonder who would match or beat it?

Tags: coldplay, concert, live, ottawa, process

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