So I was having dinner with a friend last night, telling her about Saturday’s Coldplay concert in San Jose (see “Coldplay at the HP Pavilion | San Jose, CA | 4/28/2012”). I had mentioned that after the show, I met Jason Regler, the inventor of the “xylobands”, the wrist bands handed out to concert goers to wear during the performance, which are activated over RF signal to light up (and light up with different flashing patterns) for different songs, at different times during the concert. These were first introduced for the “American Express Unstaged” concert in Madrid, which was directed by Anton Corbijn (see “Coldplay “Unstaged” at Plaza de Toros | Madrid, Spain | 10/26/2011”). In any event, since my friend has never seen Coldplay in concert, I thought I’d send her a link to one of the videos I shot during one of those sequences, so she could see just how awesome these are when employed during a show. That’s when a very strange thing happened, which I thought I’d share with the readers of the Rock Subculture Journal… [Read more…]
Coldplay at the HP Pavilion | San Jose, California | 4/28/2012 (Concert Review)
Last night, April 28th, was the second in two back-to-back performances by Coldplay at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, CA – part of their official Mylo Xyloto world tour. This was the sixth time I’ve seen Coldplay in the past six months (having seen their AMEX Unstaged show in Madrid, Spain in October, some of the special European tour dates at the O2 in London and the Palais Omnisports de Paris Bercy in December, and the special iHeartRadio charity gig at Club Nokia and the Jimmy Kimmel Live! block party in Los Angeles in February. As such, I don’t think I’m in a position to do a “normal” sort of review at this point, as I tend to subjectively compare to all of the other shows I’ve attended in the past year and beyond… but as I’ve come to expect, with last night’s gig, Coldplay put on a high energy show with a great mix of hits and new material. Watching many in the crowd seeing the show with “fresh eyes”, it was certain that the nearly 18,000 in attendance came away having shared an awesome experience with this fantastic concert.