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[9-Sep-2012] Coldplay @ Paralympics Closing Ceremony, London, UK (please post your reviews for Wiki,


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Politik instrumental at the end (open up your eyes) by the orchestra

 

And I heard some Viva chant for some seconds.

 

What an EPIC performance. I am sure that this is one of the highlights in their career - if not THE HIGHLIGHT.

 

And it will boost record sales.

 

Thanks for an EPIC PERFORMANCE, BOYS - and thanks for nice company Coldplayers.

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Paralympic Closing Ceremony 2012: Coldplay and Rihanna, review

 

coldplay_1954720b.jpg

 

Paralympic Closing Ceremony 2012: Coldplay and Rihanna, review

 

As Neil Sedaka immortalised in song, breaking up is hard to do. Modern rituals of farewell - the awkward works leaving do, the bitter divorce, the mute despair of the civic funeral - seem designed to subdue rather than elevate our deeper emotions. Without religion and ritual we flail around trying to find shared punctuation for our lives.

 

The Paralympics closing ceremony marks the teary end to Britain’s summer of sporting love, when not only did we fall in love with the games and their heroes, but each other. Danny Boyle said London 2012 should be about the best of us, and the last six weeks Britain has been able to swoon over our finest attributes: kindness, a sense of fun, ambition, determination and a love of a good party.

 

And we got to share it, whether in the flesh at the carnivalesque, music filled Olympic park, or vicariously, in our parks and town centres, or on the TV. Saying farewell to this seemingly rare outbreak of communal, unbridled joy was certainly never going to be easy. The dog’s dinner of the Olympic closing ceremony proved that but director Kim Gavin returned for a second go at the pulling off the admittedly hard trick of combining all the pomp and speeches with something that combines the excitement of a rock concert with the emotion of a wake.

 

The first lesson learnt was obvious from the beginning: the bulk of the athletes were sat in the stadium before the ceremony began, cutting out the awkward timing of an overlong parade. Secondly, the thoughtful theatricality of the Paralympics opening ceremony with Stephen Hawking was mirrored in a more thematic, pagan-style show, based around the festival of the flame and the passing of the seasons. Introduced by a sermon from Lance Corporal Rory Mackenzie from the Help for Heroes charity, it was illustrated in a fire-filled opener filled with cannibalised machines that looked like a cross between War Horse and Scrapheap Challenge, echoing some of the fantastic legs and wheelchairs on show during the games, before rather alarmingly setting fire to the lovely stadium turf.

 

Finally, Gavin chose a much simpler cast of one band, Coldplay, rather than an ego-fuelled circus of ageing stars. Coldplay are one of those marmite bands who may not be everyone’s idea of the best of British but they know how to play to a stadium and fill it with emotionally, uplifting anthems. Avoiding the potentially patronising Fix You, they instead went for a thoughful if overlong and too slow set of hits and less-well known songs from across their career. Rihanna demurely flew in on a swing to liven things up with her hit We Found Love and later Jay Z joined them on Run This Town. The band were also self-effacing enough to leave the stage show to nearly 2,000 volunteer performers and professional dancers who writhed ecstatically around them, giving the night a decidedly prog-rock feel.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/live-music-reviews/9528806/Paralympic-Closing-Ceremony-2012-Coldplay-and-Rihanna-review.html

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