Coldplay (Live at Nihon Budokan) - A Revisit

July 2006
Last night, I got acquainted to Mr. Chris Martin and the band, Coldplay. Last night, my friends and I were at Nihon Budokan (an indoor arena in Tokyo), watching Coldplay in concert, part of their "Twisted Logic" tour - my first time ever watching them live, my first time ever watching a concert in a foreign land.

Today, I'm sitting down at my laptop, working, with Coldplay playing in the background. To be honest, I've never appreciated their songs better.  In fact, I've been replaying "Yellow" over and over again, trying to understand the lyrics. But, I still have no inkling to what the lyrics is about. But one thing's for sure - last night was fantastic! The band delivered, as promised.

Chris Martin did a lot of jumping, running, and rolling within that 3 hours. After some time, I noticed that his t-shirt had holes under both arms! At first I thought that he had accidentally tore his sleeves, because of his acrobatics. But after a while, I concluded that it was a fashion statement, because the tear/holes were just too similar and consistent...hahaha!

Coming from a place where it is almost illegal to sit during a live band performance, it was a surprise to see the crowd at Nihon Budokan, all sitting in their seats! It was pretty amusing too to see Chris Martins running freely around the circle of the arena, without rowdy fans making attempts to hug or touch him - which would've happened where I come from, if he were in such close proximity to the fans! Not that the folks in the arena were unenthusiastic about Coldplay, it was just a cultural thing, I guess. That's how people are here.

After the last song, I was sort of waiting for someone to shout "One more!" or "We want more!", for the encore. But I was not surprised that no one did, and instead, everyone quietly left the hall. And finally, it was just us, three gaijins who were politely ushered out because they needed to clean the place up.

Thoughts in 2014
Well, maybe they did call for an encore. Maybe it just got lost in our survival Japanese ;P

This was how we did a selfie in 2006 :P