It was a fine day in November 2016 when out of a sudden, Coldplay put out hints in interviews that they are going to play in Asia. I was hyped, and later that month, they dropped a hint that they’ll play in Singapore. Well well well, it was perfect.
The only issue out there was on securing the ticket, as the band has become mainstream and of course a lot of people would like to see them.
It was the day of the presale for Citibank card holders yet I didn’t have one. The seller website asked for the first 6 digits before selecting seat and checking out and I had just an indigenous idea. I googled it. Yes I did, and of course what I found was the sample card numbers of it, but I tried to key it in anyway. And it worked! So yeah, I was really excited and went on to select Cat 1 seat, and checked out directly. When it asked for a credit card number, well, I keyed in my usual one. (well, since I shopped quite a lot in the previous weeks, I have accidentally memorized my credit card number, including the CVV)
So that’s it for the 2016 part.
Fast forward to 1 April 2017, I woke up to a dream, where Coldplay songs were played in my dream. There were AHFOD, AOAL, and Up&Up. Actually the Up&Up part was played in full and suddenly I woke up after that. It was 6 am, and I felt cold, and nervous. It was the day that I’ve been waiting for a very long time. Finally I would see Coldplay’s concert in person, after all these years watching them in my screen playing concerts, from their tour till festivals.
Actually I was a little bored that day as I have planned nothing to do before their concert. So I went to the venue at 4 pm. I didn’t know that there will be a mall around the National Stadium, so I brought some bread as my dinner. After I purchased my official merchandise, which is an overpriced T-shirt, I wore it in and then I started to have my dinner.
It was some time before 5 pm and I was real bored so I walked one round around the stadium, to see how the queue was, especially for the standing pen. It was crazily long. I met a friend there and he said that he was there from 10 am since he’s here for the standing pen.
After that I went to queue at my gate and sat down there in the queue. Well, at my gate, that time, the queue was especially short compared to the other kind of queue. Even the queue to the stadium toilet is longer than this. So I sat and waited and waited. Around 5:30, suddenly a lot of people came and our queue grew to awfully long.
It was 6:30 pm that they opened the gates, I stormed in and after had my bag checked briefly (they didn’t even fully check the bag as it was really a lot of people rushing in), I went to fill my water bottle at the nearest water cooler. After that I went down to my seat. It was the most front row of the seated category. But the view was like the rear-most view of standing category.
The opening act was not bad yet not good enough to entertain me. Don’t get me wrong, it is not bad, just that Jess Kent’s genre wasn’t the same as Coldplay’s. Another thing that I noticed is that the echo was really bad, so I thought that it will be as bad during Coldplay’s turn. Around 25 minutes after her singing, she stopped and there were people setting up the stage, preparing for Coldplay’s turn.
It was few minutes after 8 pm, when the lights were turned off and an opera song was played, the show is starting. A Head Full of Dreams tour has always been started this way. Afterwards, there was a video played, counting down to the start of the show. After the countdown, there was the speech The Great Dictator, which acted as opener for the song, A Head Full of Dreams, where the band started playing with all the confetti blasts. The first song was super powerful in getting me hyped, I jumped almost for the entire song. When the next song was played, the classic 2nd song of concert, Yellow, I was almost out of breath.
I took a breath, and then continued to yellow along the song. It was still rocky and powerful, reminiscing the good old Coldplay who focused on rock songs. After Yellow, came an unusual song, since in their last World Tour, this song acted as a closing song: Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall. It was great, with all the confetti and lightnings.
After that, came a sad piano riffs from The Scientist. It was my favorite Coldplay song and I blasted my tears when I sang along the song, crying joyfully as a matter that they played this song, and sadly as the feeling of the song was so sad. I even remembered my past, when my English teacher in my high school gave us an assignment to write-up about a song, and I picked this sad song, where I wrote “sometimes I dropped a tear to this song”.
There were songs that are nice to listen alone and in concerts, and Birds is nice to listen, but not in concert. They played it next, where I observed that the hype wasn’t as high as previous songs. It seems just like Don’t Let It Break Your Heart from Mylo Xylotour. Anyway, I still enjoyed the song and sang along.
Then the stage went purple. It was Paradise. It reminded me about its music video where in the end, the band played in a concert, and it was really great. Just like the rendition of Paradise in the previous concerts of AHFOD tour, they played out a remix version and we are all dancing along with the purple lights and lasers.
They stopped for a while, moving towards the centre stage. Too bad that their main direction was to face the other way, not my seat. Nevertheless, they started the acoustic session with Always in My Head.
Then, they played an unusual song, since they haven’t played it since their Mylo Xylotour I think. They played Princess of China. Yeah, it was nice.
Afterwards, only Chris was left at the centre stage and started to greet us. Starting with a joke like how the band always play a gig every weekend in Singapore but only this time that there were this many people show up; or another joke where the he was playing the whole gig but was quite distracted by the Pizza Hut logo from its stall (yeah there was PIzza Hut stall in the stadium). Nevertheless, it was the moment where he wanted to send love to all around the world, with Everglow. The moment was really magical, when he ended the song with a long “Everglow”, all of our wristband just shines a blue-white light. Really, the Xyloband was really doing a nice job in concerts. Anyway, my phone started doing something really funny where the camera did not respond when I tapped stop recording video. This caused me to miss fully recording the next few songs and the video of Chris talking and Everglow was not saved. Quite a disappointment for this newly bought Samsung phone.
An intermezzo came with Midnight music playing. And afterwards, there were Clocks with its usual red laser shows and then Charlie Brown with its colourful Xyloband lights show. Also, there were a lot of hype going onto Hymn for the Weekend. I actually didn’t really like this song, but was quite surprised that it is very popular. But yeah, there’s a song that’s good on album version, there’s another that’s good on concerts; and HFTW is good on concerts. It certainly raised my hype a moment.
The show continued with Fix You, but it was not played with a super sad piano riff anymore. Since their show at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Fix You was quite rocky and not as sad anymore. Nevertheless, it was a unique rendition of Fix You with such a choir from the audience singing along.
Tribute song was next and it was Heroes. I actually would like them to play Life on Mars rather than Heroes since it was played a lot of times already.
Viva la Vida was next, but it was quite normal already since I saw a lot of renditions of this song already.
Adventure of a Lifetime was really nice. With balloons for us to play with and everyone dancing around and “go low, stay low, and jump! ” during the mid-song.
It was a break afterwards, where it was resumed with a full version of Kaleidoscope: the full poem reading and full Obama singing Amazing Grace. The band appeared in the so-called “C-stage” where they were located in around Standing Pen B, and since it was a quite far view from my place, I couldn’t really see them well, and thanks too for the sound tower, it blocked my view almost entirely.
The band started with an acoustic version of In My Place. Well, it was quite rare for them to sing my song-for-alarm-clock in acoustic version.
Then Chris started to talk again, introducing the band, with Don’t Panic, sang by Will and Jonny. It was a really nice and rare occasion to see them singing.
Then the band left the stage with only Chris left. He started to play an unfamiliar riff on his guitar. I thought he was about to unveil a new song! I was really excited. Yeah, then he praised us all for cheering so well and he will “write and sing a new song about you all right now”. It was a song about Singapore, and it ended so well with the crowd cheering for a minute or two.
The band switched back to the main stage. Something Just Like This was next, it’s quite nice that I’ve familiarized with this new single already.
A Coldplay concert won’t be complete without A Sky Full of Stars, which they presented nicely with its super hype ending “yeah yeah yeah woooo!!!!”
When the band started playing Up&Up, I thought to myself, “oh no, final song already”. But the final song was very great, accompanied by fireworks (yes, indoor fireworks!) and the powerful “believe in love” ending. The band did the signature three bows and Chris laid down a “LOVE” flag on the floor and kissed it.
Ah, wonderful concert. It has ended, yet I felt that I haven’t had enough of it. Yeah, it has ended.
The mini task right now was to get out of the venue and went straight to home. The queue for the MRT was really long, like super long. But the movement was quite fast and in just around an hour, I reached my room, with my ear still ringing after going through a loud concert for two hours straight. I realized that for the whole concert, I couldn’t really hear my voice really well, but when I viewed my video recordings, I actually shouted quite loud here.
The feeling after the concert was quite different. I have waited for this concert for very long, went through it, and then now everything was over. I felt that one big checklist item has just been checked off and it was great. Now I’m still finding for “what’s next”.
Anyway, I brought home the Xyloband even though they were encouraged to be returned since they could recycle it for other concerts. (I heard rumours that it was quite expensive to produce during the MX tour) I saw that I could just unscrew it and see what’s inside. So yeah, it was a wristband, full of LEDs, with 3 batteries, and a single board. I didn’t know what it is, but when I took out the battery and put it in, the white light glows for a while. I’m actually quite curious on how to make this wristband controllable but I might just not have the tools to do so. So, for the time being, I put down a paper to open the circuit (so the battery won’t be drained)
Update (9 August 2017): I’ve uploaded the concert videos to my YouTube channel. Here is the link to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbinjd7_p3tV4uoZbAeoY4pYHPCmu9oON Please mind my voice singing along and also shaky video (due to me holding my phone while jumping around)