How to avoid getting ‘coldplayed'? Listen closely to Chris Martin
But a week is a long time in rock music. Now the term 'coldplayed' is circulating as a verb, meaning to be caught out while canoodling a person who is not your spouse. The chief executive of an AI company has resigned after being coldplayed. And Martin feels obliged to offer a cautious warning to his audience to be ready for their close-up.
'Now listen,' Martin told a crowd in Madison, Wisconsin, over the weekend. 'We'd like to say hello to some of you in the crowd.' He paused to chuckle, as they laughed. 'How we're going to do that is use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen.'
Three days had passed since the shot watched around the world, of Andy Byron, 50, chief executive of Astronomer, with his arms wrapped around Kristin Cabot, 52, the company's head of HR, at a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts. Martin appeared to have inadvertently exposed an extra-marital affair.
'Oh look at these two!' Martin said.
Typically, at this point, he would sing a brief stanza about the happy couple but it soon became clear that in this case, he would need to switch genres to blues or country music.
'Uh oh, what?' he said, as Byron ducked out of view and Cabot turned her back and hid her face. 'Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.'
By the weekend, the scene was being re-enacted by sports presenters and by the mascots of baseball teams in stadiums all over the country.
At Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, where the Phillies were playing the Los Angeles Angels, the Coldplay song Clocks sounded in the stadium and a series of couples kissed as they appeared on the big screen. Then the large furry green bird known as the Phillie Phanatic appeared in flagrante with another green bird that was apparently not his mate, and Martin's voice saying: 'Oh look at these two' echoed around the stadium as the mascot dived for cover.
The same night, D Baxter the Bobcat of the Arizona Diamondbacks could be seen cuddling a young blonde and Pharty, mascot of the exhibition team Party Animals, appeared with his arms wrapped around Princess Potassia of the Savannah Bananas.
Two presenters for the sports channel ESPN performed their own re-enactment in the studio.
• Cheating is bad. Doing it at a Coldplay gig is asking for trouble
Coldplay, nearing the end of a world tour, returned to the stage on Saturday evening in Wisconsin hours after the AI company Astronomer announced that Byron, its erstwhile chief executive, had tendered his resignation.
Its leaders were 'expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met', it said in a statement. It added, a little ruefully, that 'before this week, we were known as a pioneer in the DataOps space, helping data teams power everything from modern analytics to production AI'. Public awareness of the company 'may have changed overnight', it said.
Pete DeJoy, a co-founder of Astronomer who has assumed the role of interim chief executive, said in a post on LinkedIn on Monday that 'the spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team and, while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name'.
Public awareness of Coldplay's jumbotron section had also changed overnight. On stage in Wisconsin, Martin did not warn his fans to refrain from hugging people who were not their spouses. But he did tell them: 'Please, if you haven't done your make-up, do your make-up now.'
The camera singled out three men wearing Super Mario hats. 'Hello my beautiful brothers/ Seeing you makes me the opposite of cross,' Martin sang. 'Thanks for coming to our show/ Dressed in Nintendo / For coming as Super Mario Bros.'
A man dressed in a gold blazer, addressed as 'my Elton John-looking brother' was told: 'You are so beautiful to see/ Well I'm glad you're not cold/ In a suit made of gold/ And you look more like a rock star than me.'
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