Photo by BEN BRINKER
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER “I can’t tell you how happy we are to be in the City of Brotherly Love,” declared Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, who for reasons unclear ran around the Linc all night with an American Flag hanging out of his back pants pocket. “We are going to put on the best show we have ever put on!” For the next two hours, Martin and co. essayed the high water marks of their back catalog. Highlights included the beatific mopery of the aforementioned “Yellow,” the Olympics montage-worthy “Clocks,” the Woody Guthrie-esque benediction of “Til Kingdom Come,” and an unexpected acoustic reading of Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets Of Philadelphia.”
Lowlights included: the unforgivably bad digital imagery fractal-ing on three large screens behind the band all night long; the Trump-ian USA! USA! USA! chant that broke out in section 131 after “Kaleidoscope”; the insufferably inane “Hymn For The Weekend,” the desultory cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” and “Sky Full Of Stars,” a date movie of a song, during which Martin triumphantly thrust two fists in the air like he was Rocky Balboa while pirouetting beneath a steady drizzle of strobe-flashed confetti. MORE