Coldplay at GM Place, Vancouver, April 20 2012. Tamara Lee photo

Review and photos – Coldplay at Rogers Arena, Vancouver, April 20 2012

- review by Courtney Lee Yip/photos by Tamara Lee

Just the other day I had a friend tell me that the best concert of his entire life was “Hands down, Coldplay.” I shamefully admit, the music snob in me wavered a little bit, not just because of my musical preference, but mostly because I knew the chance of me actually seeing them were slim to none.

Someone out there was tuning into my head, because suddenly it’s April 20, 2012, and I’m being herded into Rogers Arena with over 18,000 other Coldplay fans.

Already warming the stage are fellow UK exports, Metronomy, a dreamy electro-rock squad mostly known for their killer remixes. Their smooth sound unabashedly filled every corner of the stadium but seemed suited more towards a more intimate venue.

Before long, neon dreamcatchers sweep our attention to the main attraction, and Rogers Arena turns into a light show spectacular that we are suddenly a part of; the wristlets we received at the start of the show are starting to rave on. Lights grow dark and our multicolored LEDs illuminate the stadium, and we become human pegs in a larger than life Lite Brite. (For a visual, recall the Coldplay and Rihanna at the Grammys.)

Coldplay at GM Place, April 20 2012. Tamara Lee photo

The sour-key shaped stage brought more Chris Martin and more confetti into my face than I could have ever hoped for. The quartet hashed out most of their Mylo Xyloto material at the start, and soon it’s nothing but hits with the likes of “The Scientist” and “Violet Hill”. Halfway through the latter Martin pauses to ask if it’s true that all of Vancouver is high right now. An affirmative roar from the stands reminds me 1) it’s 4:20, and 2) don’t smoke pot on the floor of the Rogers Arena when you’re surrounded by 10 security guards. There goes your $200 ticket, you drunk idiot.

A day-glo piano emerges from the stage and it’s time for “Up in Flames” and “Princess of China”, featuring Rihanna. Even though it’s just a video screen of the Bajan pop-princess, all is quickly forgiven as the band retreats and Martin grooves into “Warning Sign”. Lights low, we see Martin alone now, forehead to his piano keys. We’re all transported back to 2002 and if you’re in your mid-20’s, you were in the halls of your high school listening to A Rush of Blood to the Head thinking, “oh hell yeah.”

Chris Martin with Coldplay at GM Place, April 20 2012. Tamara Lee photo

The beautiful moment is shaken by the flash of an iPhone and we’re back to business. This is the beauty of a band like Coldplay. A father with his two daughters is twitpic’ing beside me while bros down the aisle have their shirts off and shaking it up like it’s game 7.

Lights trigger dance moves none of us thought we had and suddenly the music snob in you is singing all the lyrics to Viva La Vida at full volume in order to resuscitate Martin from a theatrical death, and you’ve never been happier at a concert.

The crowd-pleaser may have been the most recent single, “Paradise”, but Coldplay one-ups themselves by emerging for an encore in the seats of section 106. Running back to stage and capping it off with “Clocks” and “Fix You” was a solid cap on an evening that left myself a born-again Coldplay believer.

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Coldplay’s new video for ‘Every Teardrop is a Waterfall’

We know it’s not cool to like Coldplay but, damn, we do like this song. And U2 sure as hell aren’t writing like this anymore.

Watch – Coldplay, “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall” (video):

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Juanita Stein with Howling Bells at GM Place, June 20 2009. Ryan Walter Wagner photo

Interview with Howling Bells, June 20 2009

- by Shawn Conner/photos by Ryan Walter Wagner

Ah, irony. Or is it? I’m confused about the term ever since people started tearing poor Alanis Morissette apart for her use of the word in her song “Ironic”. You know the one, where it rains on your wedding day.

But maybe this qualifies: Howling Bells moved from Sydney to London a few years ago, and were all set to make their debut record, but their producer Ken Nelson was too busy with a Coldplay record to get to them, and what was supposed to take three weeks took eight months. It took so long, the four Howling Bells – brother/sister Joel and Juanita Stein (guitarist and singer, respectively), Brendan Picchio (bassist) and Glenn Moule (drummer) – had to get jobs. But that’s not the ironic part; the ironic part is that the group has been opening for Coldplay – the every same band that had Juanita muttering “assholes” for the better part of a year.

Anyway, Howling Bells’ new album Radio Wars has some choice cuts, particularly “Cities Burning Down”. The band’s dark sense of drama and Juanita’s obvious charisma both on record and off stage make comparisons to Metric pretty easy, though the group’s a lot lighter on the keyboards. But then they also have more modest songs like “Let’s Be Kids Again”, where the hooks quietly sink in before you know it’s happening. Perhaps the usher I overheard after their set opening for Coldplay at GM Place Saturday night (June 20) said it best. He was telling people coming in after Howling Bells that they’d missed a good band. “Everyone’s a critic,” I said. “Yeah, well, Coldplay was once an opening act, too,” he said. Too true.

I talked to Howling Bells backstage a little while after their set. (Thanks to Rich Adams from Nettwerk, btw.) Keep in mind I have no bloody idea which of the guys is talking in the following, so I tried to attribute the quotes evenly between Brendan and Joel, who were the most talkative.

Howling Bells at GM Place, June 20 2009. Ryan Walter Wagner photo

Shawn Conner: Going from the Sydney music scene to London, it must’ve been a world of difference.

Juanita: It was ferocious.

SC: Scary?

Juanita: Everything about London was scary. Not just music. Everything. The smell, the taste. Prices didn’t matter because we didn’t have any money at all.

Brendan Picchio: Everything was free, strangely enough.

Juanita: We made sure everything was free. For a little while.

BP: But it was very exciting, too. You’d go into a news agent’s and there were kids wrapped around the music section. You couldn’t get through them to get an NME.

SC: Music is such a culture there.

Juanita: There are never NME’s left. They’re gone within 24 hours. In Australia we have like two news agencies.

SC: Speaking of NME, you guys’ve gotten a lot of good press from those guys. Do they still like a band one day, and hate them the next?

BP: They’ve definitely kept their side. That’s who they are.

Juanita: They like to keep you on your feet. Some magazines which I won’t name have had the same artists on the cover for the last four years. I can’t see other than maybe they’ll keep every few years putting Nirvana on the cover, imagine them doing that.

Howling Bells at GM Place, June 20 2009. Ryan Walter Wagner photo

SC: Moving to London must’ve made you stronger as a band.

Glenn Moule: It tested us.

Joel: It’s such a tough place to live you can find yourself in some tight spots. Sometimes you get in pretty tough situations. There are dodgy people there. It’s not as free-flowing as Australia. You have to look out for each other.

SC: Like people offering you things?

Joel: Like candy?

Juanita: It’s not so much like that in London, people promising you things. You’re either fucking crap, or you’re great. That’s it.

SC: It seems like touring would be relaxing after living in London.

Joel: It is. Well, I find this tour to be relaxing.

BP: This has been the friendliest bunch of people. Not just the bands but the crew. The crowds. Everyone’s gone out of their way to make us really at home.

GM: Once you’ve finished playing and you go out to see the next band people actually come up to you and say, “Wow, that was an amazing show.”

SC: Are you frustrated playing a half hour set?

BP: We have so much excess energy after we play the show. Us and Snow Patrol. We end up going crazy together. You just start getting that flow. It’s a tease, like making love and stopping.

Juanita: Just the foreplay.

SC: When you first moved to London, you planned to make the album in three weeks…

Joel: It took eight months.

Juanita: We had no idea what we were doing.

SC: You just woke up in London.

Juanita: We kind of did. We didn’t know anyone, we didn’t have any contacts. We didn’t have an agent, we didn’t have a label. We just, in a moment of sheer naivete, hopped on a plane.

GM: Which was the best decision.

Joel: It was part naivete, part adventure. We got there and we thought we were going to make a record pretty soon. And it turned out it was Coldplay delaying the making of the record. It took them eight months. And the other night Chris [Martin, Coldplay frontman] apologized ’cos he had no idea.

BP: We all got different jobs, we lived on the floor of this house.

Joel: It was smaller than this room.

SC: Who had the worst job?

Juanita: [to Brendan and Glenn] Didn’t you guys work at a place selling locks or curtains?

BP: Double-glazed windows. We were doing call-ups. It was exactly like The Office. It was unbelievable. Interesting days.

SC: But the new record was a breeze, comparatively.

Juanita: Emotionally it was just as involved. The logistics were easier.

Joel: Uh, hold on. We waited a long time. Nearly a year before everything fell into place.

Juanita: We were finishing with our old label [Bella Union], there was a lot of red tape.

Joel: We made this record and we were pumped and excited. Nine months later it came out. That nine months was torture.

Juanita: We’ve got the next record ready to go. We don’t want to wait.

Joel: We’re just going to record it. The waiting in between -

Juanita: Kills the buzz.

SC: When you say emotionally involved…

Juanita: As in, just as involved in the process, in a positive way. Collectively more so, because we wrote this record together. The first record was a lot more my songs, written in a dark room mourning lost love. This one was all of us.

SC: So as brother and sister, who looked at who and said Hey, we should form a band?

Juanita: I think I came into your room…

Joel: I was in my top bunk bed learning guitar.

BP: Things haven’t changed, huh.

Joel: I’m on a triple bunk bed now, on a bus.

Juanita: He had picked up guitar and was completely infatuated with Hendrix.

Joel: And Sonny Terry.

Juanita: And I would hear him every day, just screeching. And I was starting to write a lot of songs.

SC: Teenage poetry kind of stuff?

Juanita: No, good songs.

SC: You didn’t go through a teenage poetry phase?

Joel: Is that a Canadian thing?

Juanita: I suppose the lyrics to the songs were a kind of poetry… All of us come from musical families. Our dad’s a great songwriter.

SC: Has he done any recording?

Juanita: Oh yeah, we covered one of his songs at the end of the last record.

Joel: he’s written five thousand songs in two years.

Juanita: He’s great, he’s written for Blind Boys of Alabama. It’s a lot more blues-y gospel-y than what we do.

SC: Sounds like a great household to grow up in.

Joel: Confusing and loud, but great as well.

SC: The video for “Cities Burning Down”… I always like apocalyptic imagery… you guys dressed as bikers, what’s that from? An homage?

Juanita: Definitely Rumblefish, one of our favourites. The Wild One. We’re all huge fans of ’60s films, and these guys ride motorcycles. The motorcycle culture is very sexy.

Howling Bells at GM Place, June 20 2009. Ryan Walter Wagner photo

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Coldplay at GM Place June 20 2009.

Review – Coldplay at GM Place, Vancouver, June 20 2009

- review by Shawn Conner

Let me say upfront that I’ve never been a huge Coldplay fan, though individual songs have wowed me – “Talk”, for instance, never fails to slay. Other songs have struck me as too vanilla, melodramatic, sappy – none of those are exactly the right word, but some combination of the three.

But the show at GM Place was great.

Unfortunately, I’d made the mistake of reading a review (of the Edmonton concert) beforehand, and so things that should have been surprises weren’t. It was like seeing The Crying Game and already knowing Darth is Luke’s father.

So if you intend on seeing Coldplay on its current tour (Europe, then back in North America), skip this review, or skip to the last paragraphs about Howling Bells and Snow Patrol.

Coldplay at GM Place, June 20 2009.

What made the Coldplay show enjoyable and awesome and all that is the connection the band, and especially singer Chris Martin, has with the fans. The audience was definitely part of it – arena singalongs and Coldplay arena singalongs are two different things. This was an audience that seemed in ecstasy from the moment the band took the stage. (And swooned even more when Martin buttered ‘em up by noting his band could have filmed a concert DVD in 19 countries but chose Canada, specifically Vancouver.)

Each song got its own special treatment, and no trick was unturned in Martin’s working of the crowd. The cellphone (“Mobiles as well call them in the UK,” said Martin) wave, the foray into the other side of the arena, the butterfly confetti, the yellow balloons, it was all there. U2 and Peter Gabriel are the other two arena shows I can compare this spectacle to; maybe Bruce Springsteen as well, though he’s a lot less gimmicky.

Coldplay at GM Place, Vancouver, June 20 2009.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I loved the gimmicks. I loved Martin’s lack of guile, Will Champion‘s pounding beat, and Jonny Buckland‘s sinewy riffs, too. There were songs I liked more hearing them live, songs I never knew I liked as much as I did, and sure, a few (mostly the piano ballads) I could do without. It was still a magnificent show.

Snow Patrol is more problematic. I like the scruffy Scots when they rock, as on “Eyes Open”; but “Chasing Cars” has always struck me as a maudlin bore (hence it’s inclusion on Grey’s Anatomy). Can’t fault the band for trying, though, and singer Gary Lightbody gave it his all.

Howling Bells had the advantage of being fresh and the disadvantage of being unknown to the crowd and stuck in the soundtrack-to-finding-the-seat position on the bill. But the London-by-way-of Sydney quartet won over at least a few fans with its dark-edged, big-chorused rock; after the set, one of the ushers could be heard telling people as he directed them to their seats, “too bad you missed the opening band, they were really good. You know, Coldplay was once an opening band, too.”

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