Coldplay: Chris Martin asks Glastonbury audience to send love to Israel and Palestine in a speech about world peace

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Chris Martin asked the Glastonbury audience to send their love to Israel and Palestine during Coldplay’s headlining performance.

The British band, who broke a record with their fifth headlining appearance at the Worthy Farm Festival, were the top act on Saturday (June 30), playing songs such as “Yellow”, “The Scientist” and “Vida La Vida”.

During their set, which TThe Independent They called it the “spectacle of our lives” and welcomed several surprise guests, including Michael J Fox, Little Simz and Palestinian-Chilean singer Elyanna.

At one point, frontman Martin stopped the music and turned on the lights while asking the crowd to raise their hands and send love wherever they wanted in the world.

After asking the 100,000 spectators to put their phones away for “A Sky Full of Stars,” Martin said: “Just raise your hands like this and face the main stage like this. Now we’re going to send out a big Glastonbury prayer of love. OK, we’re going to send it out for five seconds.”

Martin, who campaigns for world peace, then said: “You can send it to anyone: you can send it to your grandmother, you can send it to Israel, you can send it to Palestine, you can send it to Myanmar. You can send it to Ukraine, you can send it to beautiful Russia. You can send it anywhere – you can send it from Glastonbury to the whole world.”

He later thanked the crowd “for giving us and me back the belief that most people, with all their flags, all their colors, all their genders, sexualities, ages and everything, can come together very peacefully and just sing and have fun and eat ice cream without fighting, nothing like that.”

Martin continued: “So thank you for your inspiration. Hopefully we can send all of this out into the world together as a beacon of togetherness in a time when it seems impossible. You just proved that it is. That’s amazing, thank you very much.”

On Friday (June 28), Idles received praise for their performance calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

Other stars who performed at this year’s festival include Cyndi Lauper, ambitious rock band The Last Dinner Party and 2000s pop group Sugababes, whose impressive performance was marred by overcrowding.

For Coldplay, this was their first headlining appearance since 2016 – and during the set, Martin reminisced about his very first appearance at the New Bands Tent in 1999. They had previously headlined the festival in 2002, 2005 and 2011.