Coldplay performed the Super Bowl halftime show in 2016, and now Chris Martin is looking back on that performance — and ahead to Rihanna‘s — in a conversation with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1.
“I’ve never watched it back,” he says of Coldplay’s performance, which featured guest appearances from Beyoncé and Bruno Mars. He notes, “We got quite a hard time afterwards from some people who didn’t really like it, which was hard to take at the time.”
“But then at a certain point I realized, ‘Well, we did exactly what we wanted to do.’ We would do [it] exactly the same way, I think. We would ask the same guests.”
“In retrospect, we really loved doing it, and in a way for us [it was] like a coming-out ceremony of, ‘This is who we really are,’ being yourself,” Chris explains.
Getting artists to reveal their “true identities” during “one of the only cultural events in America that everyone is watching,” Chris continues, is why he thinks of the halftime show as “the most wonderful Trojan horse, in a way, in the world.”
He explains, “In the middle of this quite masculine, gigantic beer-drinking thing, you put all these artists and exposed them to a lot of people who would never be interested in Prince or in us, or in Katy Perry or whoever.”
As for Rihanna, with whom Coldplay collaborated on the song “Princess Of China,” he says, “You have to be an idiot not to recognize that she’s the best singer of all time … I think she could just walk out in sweatpants and sing, and that would be just great.”
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