The sun slicing through the Dublin evening skyline makes the after-work traffic bearable on the hike out to furthest Rathfarnham. Indeed, the gridlock is so bad that we miss the start of Interpol and have to be content to hear the masterful ‘NYC’ and the driving ‘Obstacle One’ while walking down the leafy path that leads to the venue. And what a venue it is… the finest outdoor arena in the Dublin area, bar none. The mountains form an aesthetically pleasing backdrop but the real winner is the sound. Arriving as the New York quintet dive into ‘Evil’, it’s immediately apparent that this is the finest outdoor sound system I’ve ever heard. Interpol are in fine form and are suitably appreciated by the growing crowd, some converted, some merely interested onlookers here solely for the main act. And Coldplay do not disappoint them.
Chris Martin & Co. arrive on stage to the opening strains of ‘Square One’, Martin pirouetting on one foot a la Bono. Only two songs in and he already has the majority of the audience eating out of his tattooed hands, bastardising a rowdy ‘Politik’ to namecheck the 20,000 or so bodies who have come out to worship at the altar of Coldplay, as well as paying lip service to Bono, Andrea Corr and Christy Moore. “Some places are born great and Dublin was born just a little bit greater”, he enthuses, to rapturous applause.
What surprises most about the next hour and a half is how good Coldplay are when they decide to rock out. Sure, they can do melancholy better than most of their po-faced rivals, but when they let their hair down, as on an incendiary ‘Yellow’, ‘Clocks’ (complete with an impressive strobe light show) and ‘White Shadows’, they work up a serious head of steam.
Of the slower songs, ‘The Scientist’ provokes the kind of mass singalong you’d expect, before the song segues into a series of reverse loops towards the end. ‘Till Kingdom Come’, the hidden track on X&Y, originally written for Johnny Cash, sees a stripped-down quartet taking it all back to basics (drummer Will Champion taking over keyboard duties). Even a string of fuck-ups as they attempt a seriously ropy version of ‘Warning Sign’ can’t detract from the general air of bonhomie that’s permeating Marlay Park. The closing ‘Fix You’, my favourite track from X&Y, ends the night on a suitably hopeful note, the fireworks blazing into the night sky before the gigantic moon illuminates the way home.
The 2005 model of Coldplay owes rather a lot to U2, from some of Johnny’s Edge-like guitar-licks to Chris’ catch-all choruses, and the singer namechecks Bono’s mob as “still the best band in the world” during the encore. But on this evidence, Dublin’s fab four have some serious competition.