Coldplay: Live 2012

Every show is different.

When the lights go down that's 30,000 people's lives colliding...

for that one moment.

Everyone that's there working or watching is there for that moment

It's when you're all kind of in agreement about what you're all doing at that time...

so it's a wonderful feeling of togetherness and possibility

Then I start getting real adrenaline...

and start doing 'Rocky' shadow boxing and all that kind of stuff.

So I get as excited as anyone else

And I still get that excitement when I go and see anyone else's concert.

I love that moment

And then it's about trying to hold that energy for an hour and a half..

because it can go if you're not careful

Whilst it might not be perceived as cool

to be really enthused by the fact that people show up to hear your music...

we don't really give a f***, we really love that and it's exciting, you know ?

It's exciting when you're 15 and you throw a party and people come...

so imagine what it's like on a daily basis to have 20,000 people coming. It's crazy!

Ever since I was about 12, the sight of microphones...

and dark venues and people plugging things in, it gets me really thrilled

When I was at school, when we had a concert three months away...

that would be the thing you'd just aim for and look forward to

in the build-up to a concert I just get really excited

I'm aware of everyone running around

There's always a panic about something

You know,the rain's coming down or... the wristbands aren't working...

or Will's bench-pressed too much and his abs have burst

I don't know what the problems might be-

Guy's just become too handsome to be lit properly...

or Jonny's fingers have started moving too fast and he's gone play too many notes

Whatever the problem is, I always enjoy watching it get solved before 9 pm

Every show takes me a while to get ready

It starts as soon as I wake up and... thinking about it

Getting ready to go on stage and going on stage is like a complete release

I think Bruce Springsteen says to the E Street Band...

you know, tonight could be someone's first concert or someone's last concert...

so we nicked that!

Every night, before we go on stage...

I think of the person in the top right-hand seat in the back of the room

Like, what would they want to see ? So I forget about my own issues

It's like you can flick a switch and just letting yourself go

When people show up now it's just like

you can just get out of your head and go into your heart...

and it's an amazing feeling, it's like primal scream therapy, in a way

It's just total abandon... and no one can stop you

We're having the best time

We're managed with this album to replace our natural English anxiety with gratitude

meaning that we can really enjoy ourselves without feeling guilty about it

which is kind of how some of us were raised to feel as our culture

On this Mylo tour is been the first tour where we've really looked at people in the eye while we playing

You look at each other and it's a great feeling

You might never look at that person in the eyes again either in your life, so you have a real connection

I probably get to look at maybe a thousand people a night

Not many people get to do that I've never tried to explain it before

It's like every time you look someone in the eyes you put a little thread between you

so you can really connect with a lot of the audience

You have to approach everything from the freshness that they bring into it

So by the time you finish, you feel like you've got a sort of spider web of connection

rather than a detached feeling which is what I used to sometimes feel

Our favourite city in the world is Glastonbury Festival...

which is a city made up of tents and cows

and that doesn't exist for more than about three or four days a year..

so when we wanted to launch the album we had to pick somewhere else that we loved...

to do the album launch concert...

so we chose somewhere we thought the audience would be realy vocal and fantastic...

and that was Madrid- and it was a good choice.

I think the initial image we started with...

for the Mylo Xyloto album...

was a rose bursting through concrete

That was the kind of starting point of the whole thing...

was the splash of life and colour and passion...

in a bleak, grey place

Everything else kind of grew out that one image

It feels like we're in the middle of the tour, right...

smack bang in the middle

We've done quite a lot of this... but there's still a lot more to go

It just feels like something we've never really done this well before

You know, it feels like we're ready to play stadiums now...

which I don't think we've ever felt like before

Stage-wise, we've got an artist called Paris...

and a designer called Misty to help us paint absolutely everything

We've got all the guitars, all the amps...

these enormous hundred metre drapes that we've put over the back

You know, the whole of the stage floor is painted

Everything's just covered in luminous paint

We wanted to take over the whole stadium and make it feel like it was ours

A show like this is a big undertaking

I think there's about 60 trucks on this tour, something like that

Every gig is different, every crowd is different, every stadium's different

We're playing the biggest gigs we've ever played

We feel like we're doing it as well as we've ever done

There's a really nice atmosphere on tour

We're lucky that we've worked with loads of great people

A lot of our background crew, which are the people who look after our amps...

and guitars and drums and all of that stuff..

have been with us pretty much since we started touring

Some of them, you know, some of them twelve, thirteen years

They're almost as much a part of the band as we are

We always tour with a football and a cricket bat and a cricket ball

We try and play football quite a lot usually against the crew

and we occasionally knock a cricket ball around

Will's got a ridiculous underarm spin bowl that he can do

He's just unreadable

One of his many talents!

It really feels like a gang travelling the world it feels like a family...

like kind of a circus family, I suppose

and the ringmaster of that circus is Dave Holmes, our manager

We can just play the music, really they make it look good and sound good

I think there's about 70 or 80 people travelling

You know, we get onto planes, we get into cars, we get on trains...

we get on helicoptes, everything we've done it all

Not rockets, actually, we've never done rockets

We've played a few memorable venues on this tour

We've played the Hollywood Bowl...

and that was the first time we played there in eleven years or something like that

We've done some small gigs on this tour as well

We played in Dingwall's in Camden...

and the last time we were in Paris we played the Cigale.

I think the Mylo tour has been the best tour we've done

From a production point of view, from an organisational point of view...

it's been brilliant

We worked really hard from day one and Phil Harvey has been instrumental in it

He's really steered the ship

Phil Harvey is our fifth member

He was our first and original manager

He paid for us to record our first EP, he put on our first proper show in London

He's one of us, he's the buffer between us and everything else...

and he's a student of music -kind of- performance and production

you know, he knows everything about the history of touring ...

and the productions that people used

he studies bands and where they go wrong, when was their hey-day,why was that...

what was happening at that time that made them so great...

what can you learn from...

you know, knowing about the history of rock music

He's had the casting vote in our prickliest decisions...

and he's really the reason we've been getting better since 2005

So on this tour we'll visit something like 24 or 25 different countries...

playing 120, 125 shows