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It's just good business, North America is by far the biggest recorded and live music market in the world and Coldplay are one of the very few Foreign bands that have been able to tap the market in any significant way. It's where they've generated more income than any other single market (including the UK) throughout their career. They need to maintain their visability there, which is why they do so much.

There's really not much that can be done for it. FWIW large indoor arenas weren't really built with proper acoustics for live music in mind either.

Open air gigs always have horrible sound IMHO.

To be fair, I wouldn't characterize Guy's playing as particularly technically complex. He mostly sticks to root chords and plays in the pocket. He's a lot like Adam Clayton in U2, a player in a big band who is often derided as a player of simple parts who nonetheless is a huge part of his band's overall sound. I also thing Guy can play more complicated stuff than Coldplay music generally calls for. They're a pop band, they don't really need a bunch of fancy playing.

Really? Really, when I've seen them live (every tour from AROBTTH on except the GS promo tour they just did) his bass sound seems pretty crushing.

As for bass sound, I suspect that has more to do with how you're listening to the music than anything. Listen through (good) headphones, the bass is there, but bass frequencies are one of the easiest things to drop out of a speaker mix because they're low. Of the 6 albums so far, the only one I think his bass tracks tend to be somewhat buried in the mix on is MX. A lot of the ghost stories tracks feature some really standout bass parts IMHO. As for his relationship with Chris (and the others), I think they're fine. Chris interacts a lot with him when they perform live and playfully teases and jokes with him a lot. It's also worth noting that several of the first times Chris was photographed since his divorce became public knowledge, he was hanging out with Guy. Guy's just by his own admission shyer and moodier than the others, which means he's going to be in the background a bit.

Only the person(s) Phil said them to knows what he actually said. The rest of us are getting a second hand report at best (and sometimes a multi-hand account that's been translated into other languages and then back to English). Mistakes, miscommunications and errors just happen, it's not fair to blame it on the source when no one knows if that's where the root error lies.

You have to understand the band and the people around them are human, and like all humans say things off the cuff that are never intended as written in stone pronouncements. Someone asked him a question casually, and he quickly replied. Again though, who knows, the band may have actually been considering a bigger tour back then.

It's probably a simple miscommunication. Perhaps he was referring to something else like the 6 date promo tour that happened over the summer, or perhaps the band was considering a more complete tour at one point.

Agreed, I'm just saying from every piece of confirmed information we have available, the band doesn't wish to tour anywhere for the immediate future. I doubt very highly that they'd go anywhere (not just South America) and play a one off stadium gig right now. Chris himself recently confirmed the band has decided not to tour Ghost Stories.

It's best not to put much stock in any "announcements" that don't come officially from the band. They happen all the time and the vast majority of them come to nothing. I'm sure the band will get there eventually, but given that they're not touring much at all right now, it may not be for a long time yet.

^this. There at the stage of their career now where many bands start to have very lengthy gaps between releases. Coldplay have still never had more than 3 years. (which really cuts down to 1 year when you subtract the 2+ years of touring they typically did)

Again though, that's just the way it goes. Look how many places Radiohead omitted on TKOL tour a couple years ago, or how many years (typically 4-5) between U2 tours these days. I think the days of Coldplay being a band that tours frequently and abundantly may be over for good, and that's something we may just have to all get used to.

Pretty sure that was just Chris joking around. He teases Guy about stuff all the time.

It's not unusual for bands at their level to tour relatively infrequently. They're now firmly established as one of the biggest acts on the planet, don't need the money, don't need to fight to maintain their career status and all have small children. They're in a position to take some time off and it looks like that's what they want to do right now.

Looked pretty large to me. IMHO he also looked rather unwell in general compared to the rest of the guys.

They do, but it usually takes longer and is easier to still find face value tickets, as well as closer to face value tickets. But yeah, the MX stadium tour was completely sold out. (at least officially)

While it is true that U2 did offer a bloc of $30 tickets for the 360 tour, those were seats at the back of 80,000-100,000 seat stadiums and the price was subsidized by insane prices for the better tickets. In fact, U2 actually directly engaged in premium ticket auctioning for that tour. What they did is not really applicable to Coldplay's tour of venues that only seat a couple thousand. At the end of the day, touring is a commercial enterprise and being "fair to fans" isn't the point. Selling the entire allotment of tickets is.

In most cases yes, but it also has implications for things like people buying tickets as a gift (if they don't plan to attend), someone buying a group's tickets and then having to bow out leaving everyone else in a lurch, parents buying tickets for underage kids who will attend the show alone, legitimate resale/swapping of tickets if one becomes unable to attend, etc. There are loads of situations where the name on the credit card isn't the person attending the gig. To be honest though, I'm not really against ticket reselling for profit as long as the people who do so have to go through the same channels as everyone else to get their tickets in the first place.

Especially since poor Chris went through looking like he'd just been in a fight.

It's really not that difficult. There's enough money to be made that touts invest a tremendous amount of time, money, software and equipment into getting the tickets. It's not like the old days when touting meant some shady dude outside the venue holding up a pair of tickets. It's big business. Every time the ticket sellers put measures in place, the touts are rapidly working on countermeasures. Personally I'm not a fan of matching tickets to ID because it greatly limits what legitimate buyers can do with the tickets they paid for. As hard as it is to accept, I think a large amount of touting is always going to go on as long as the demand is there. This is especially true when a massive band like Coldplay plays a small number of shows in small venues as they've been doing lately. You can't book a stadium band into small theaters and not expect a mess.

Guy's bass is probably just turned down in the live mix there.

You can try, but I honestly wouldn't expect a response. Debs has always dodged questions related to things like this in the past. (and rightly so really, there's enough legal issues involved that the band can't be making statements on the matter without tangling themselves up in a lot of issues.) At best you'll get some boilerplate response about how they want to get tickets into the hands of fans.

Not so at all. They are both 100% legitimate instruments. In fact, Chris and Guy are 2 of something like only 5 laser harp players in the UK at the moment.

If they intend on keeping live arrangements of songs even remotely similar to the recorded versions they pretty much have to. Even if they made an effort to cut them down and added additional live musicians, there's still a lot of stuff in some of their tracks that can't practically be replicated in a touring environment without using tracks. (for example strings, they're not going to tour with an orchestra) TBH, I think they're moving in this direction a bit. the Ghost Stories material does feature more live playing than a lot of previous material. (for instance the parts they play on the laser harp and some of Will's doubled electric drums would likely have been overdubbed in the past)