"We're not touring this album," frontman Chris Martin told BBC News. "We're taking time over the next year or two, to work out how our tour can be sustainable as well as actively beneficial. We want our future tours to have a positive impact".
Coldplay will
release their new album Everyday Life on Friday and, instead of spending months
on the road, they are playing two gigs in Jordan, which will be broadcast,
free, to a global audience on YouTube.
The concerts,
will take place in Amman on Friday at sunrise and sunset respectively,
mirroring the two "sides" of their new album. All proceeds
from the show will be donated to an environmental charity.
"Our next
tour will be the best possible version of a tour environmentally," Martin
said. "We will be disappointed if it's not carbon neutral. The hardest
thing is the flying side of things. But our dream is to have a
show with no single use plastic, to have it largely solar powered."
The WWF – World Wide
Fund for Nature - welcomed Coldplay's initiative. "It is fantastic
to see world-famous artists stepping up to protect the planet. We all
have a responsibility to lead by example in the face of this climate and nature
crisis - inaction is not an option if we are to preserve our planet for future
generations," said Gareth Redmond-King, the organization's head of climate
change.
The UK band last
travelled the world with their A Head Full of Dreams Tour, which saw them stage
122 shows across five continents in 2016 and 2017.
Staging a world
tour isn't as simple as bunging Chris Martin and his bandmates in the back of a
mini-van with a map and a year's supply of digestives. In fact, the
band's last tour employed 109 crew, 32 trucks and 9 bus drivers, who
travelled to 5 continents, playing to 5.4 million people at 122 concerts.
There's no easy way to calculate the band's carbon
footprint; but the music industry's most recent figures suggest that
live music generates 405,000 tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in the UK every
year.
It's not just
flights that cause the problem. Fans travelling to and from shows are the
biggest source of pollution; but there's an environmental cost to producing
merchandise, powering the spotlights and moving stages from venue to venue.
At the most
extreme end of the scale, the ambitious "claw" structure that U2 took
on the road in 2009 required 120 trucks to shift it around. According to one
environmental group, the band generated the equivalent carbon footprint of a
return flight to Mars. Since then, the industry has stepped up its efforts to
become more sustainable.
Radiohead swapped spotlights for LEDs, which use a
fraction of the power needed for a traditional lighting rig. The 1975 have
stopped making new merchandise, and are donating £1 from every ticket sold to
One Tree Planted, a non-profit organization that plants trees all over the
world. And U2 have enacted a number of changes, from recycling guitar
strings to using hydrogen fuel cells.
Coldplay are
going one step further. They don't just want to be carbon neutral, but to have tours
that are "actively beneficial" to the planet. And by putting their
concerts on hold, they're giving up a huge pay day: The Head Full of Dream tour
made $523m.
The industry
will be watching to see what solutions they come up with.
From BBC (edited)
