Chris Martin asked the Glastonbury crowd to send love to Israel and Palestine during Coldplay’s headline set. The British band, who broke a record with their fifth headline performance at the Worthy Farm festival, were top billing on Saturday (30 June), tearing through tracks including “Yellow”, “The Scientist” and “Vida La Vida”.
During their set, which The Independent called a “spectacle of a lifetime”, they welcomed several surprise guests including Michael J Fox, Little Simz and Palestinian-Chilean singer Elyanna. At one stage, frontman Martin stopped the music and had the lights turned up while he asked the crowd to raise their hands and send love to anywhere they wanted in the world.
After asking the 100,000-strong crowd to put their phones away for “A Sky Full of Stars”, Martin said: “Just raise your hands like this and turn towards the main stage like this. Now, we’re gonna send a big Glastonbury love thing. OK, for five seconds, we’re gonna send it out.” Martin, advocating for world peace, then said: “You can send it to anyone: you can send it to your grandmother, you can send it to Israel, you can send it to Palestine, you can send it to Myanmar. You can send it to Ukraine, you can send it to beautiful Russia. You can send it anywhere – you can send it all over the world from Glastonbury.”
He later thanked the crowd “for giving us and me restored faith that most humans can gather together very peacefully with all different flags, all different colours, all different genders, sexualities, ages, everything, and just sing and have a good time and ice cream, there’s no fighting, nothing like that”. Martin continued: “So thank you for being inspiring to us, and hopefully we’re sending all this out into the world all together as a beacon of togetherness in a time when it might seem like that’s impossible, you just proved that it is, so that’s amazing, thank you.”
On Friday (28 June), Idles were praised for their set that saw them call for a ceasefire on Gaza. Other stars to have played this year’s festival include Cyndi Lauper, ambitious rock band The Last Dinner Party and, with an impressive performance tainted by overcrowding, 2000s pop group Sugababes. This was Coldplay’s first time headlining since 2016 – and during the set, Martin reminisced on playing for the very first time in the New Bands Tent back in 1999. They also previously headlined the festival in 2002, 2005 and 2011.
