My daughter told me that I ought to watch the Coldplay concert at Glastonbury. This is not the kind of thing I would watch as a matter of course, I know very little about the band and their music, so it was with a sense of duty, and my best attempt at being a good parent that I opened the programme on the BBC iPlayer and was shocked to see that it went on for two hours! A whole one hundred and twenty minutes of my life on my day off that could have been put to much better use. Within the first few minutes of the show, I was hooked. Returning from a holiday in Cornwall in the summer of 2022 Karen and I drove right past Worthy Farm, and the experience was a little underwhelming, it was just another farm, what a disappointment.
Right at the beginning of their set, the lead singer of Coldplay Chris Martin said how good it was to be back in the city of Glastonbury “City?” I thought, surely Glastonbury is a town. Maybe he was right, with an attendance of around 200,000 people, it was equivalent to more than the entire population of Ipswich and many of our cities in the UK. Coldplay performed to an estimated crowd of 120,000 people and it sent shivers down my spine as I watched, and the two hours passed far too quickly. I can’t believe that I am saying this, but if you haven’t watched the show and have a spare couple of hours, I can recommend it.
What I found amazing about the show was the feeling of love in the place, I can’t even imagine standing in a crowd of 120,000 people and normally we associate bad things with huge crowds of people, but that wasn’t the case here, folk were there to see the band they loved, and the atmosphere was electric, even watching on a television. The other thing that I found amazing was that the crowd knew the words to the songs and at points the band stopped performing and left the crowd to sing. I have stood in front of congregations a thousand times smaller and been hit by a wall of sound and can’t even imagine what it must feel like to stand on the stage and listen not only to the sheer volume, but to know that all those people are singing the works that you penned. Incredible!
It occurred to me as I watched that this was worship at its very best, yes of course, there was that worship of a famous band, but it was much more than that, there was something deep and spiritual about the occasion. The benefit of watching on TV is that I get to see the faces in the crowd close up, and my heart warmed as I looked at the love in the crowd on a warm summers evening out in the fields of Somerset. I guess that only a small percentage of the gathered crowd would share my sentiment, but in this purely secular situation, I saw the hand of God at work.