Coldplay's road to Abu Dhabi has been painstakingly plotted as part of their mission to make touring more sustainable.
While recording their eighth studio album, 2019’s Everyday Life – during which chief songwriter Chris Martin travelled to Palestine to collaborate with Le Trio Joubran – the band knew they would not tour that album.
Part of the reason was that its songs were crafted more for the studio than the stage, but a primary motivation to scale back their live shows – already massive productions designed for stadiums – was to find a more sustainable way to tour.
The extended time away from the stage, enforced by the Covid-19 pandemic, prompted the band to seek guidance from experts, including those at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, to refine their vision. In 2021, a day before the release of their Music of the Spheres album, the band unveiled their path forward.
In the official announcement, they described the accompanying tour as being designed to be “as sustainable as possible, and, just as importantly, to harness the tour’s potential to push things forward. We won’t get everything right, but we’re committed to doing everything we can and sharing what we learn”.
Initiatives include using solar stations at venues, a kinetic floor that generates energy from the crowd’s movements and providing free water to discourage single-use plastic bottles. The focus on environmental sustainability also extends to tour routing. While most bands typically plan theirs based on profitability rather than ecological considerations, Coldplay has chosen to limit air travel and adopt ground fleet operations powered by electric vehicles or biofuel.
This approach also involves adopting a hub strategy when deciding which cities and countries to visit. Beyond having the infrastructure to accommodate the tour’s specifications for multiple dates, chosen locations need to be relatively accessible to audiences from surrounding regions. This is reflected in the accompanying graphs, which illustrate Coldplay’s journey to Abu Dhabi and where the tour will head next.
For example, rather than visiting seven countries in South America as they did during their A Head Full of Dreams tour in 2016, Coldplay limited their stops on the continent to three countries while still performing 11 stadium shows – one more than their previous tour.
In Europe, cities such as Frankfurt, Paris and London were selected for their accessibility. Meanwhile, nearly every Asian stop – except for Jakarta’s 78,500-capacity Gelora Bung Karno Stadium – hosted two shows. In Australia, they played nine concerts across three cities.
With their four shows at Abu Dhabi's Zayed Sports City Stadium acting as the tour leg for the region, Coldplay will then make stops in India, Hong Kong and South Korea before returning to North America and London.
This meticulous approach has resulted in Music of the Spheres becoming Coldplay's longest tour with 225 announced shows, and there could be more shows in the pipeline. In an interview with The National in December 2021, three months before the tour opened in Costa Rica, consultant Paul Schurink from Zap Concepts predicted this leaner and cleaner approach could mean the tour would last “probably three to five years”.
