Review
Awe and wonder
Culture
6 min read

A Sky Full of Stars: lessons on awe from Coldplay's concert

Unexpectedly finding herself among a sea of 90,000 people at a recent Coldplay concert, Belle Tindall reflects on what the experience taught her about the nature of awe and wonder.
A singer struts a stage pointing to the spotlight as coloured orbs float down.
Coldplay's Music of the Spheres tour.
Stevie Rae Gibbs, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Coldplay are about to wrap up the European leg of their Music of the Spheres tour; their multi year-long and (literally) world-wide spectacle. When I say spectacle, I really mean it. The three-hour long show is nothing short of an audio-visual marvel, one that they’ve played to millions of people over the past year or so, and a couple of weeks ago, I was (rather unexpectedly) one of them.  

Hold your personal tastes for a while, leave your ‘Coldplay make me cringe’ critiques at the door (you can pick them back up at the end), and allow me a moment to paint the picture for you.  

The band adorn alien masks, they duet with a puppet, they dance upon a stage that changes colour beneath their feet, they release a tidal wave of giant beach balls, they dance through a downpour of confetti, and they bring it to an end under a canopy of fireworks. That’s not to mention their most infamous party-trick, the wristbands that turn the audience themselves into the lightshow. The result is, as you can imagine, utterly breath-taking. The crowd become a panoramic murmuration of colour that dances around the stadium.  

Aside from the long queues for the bathroom and the sticky folding seats, the escapism is all-encompassing, it doesn’t falter for a moment. All of it made all the more wholesome for knowing that its being powered (at least in part) by the kinetic dancefloor and the spin bikes towards the back of the stadium.  

And I know what you’re thinking, I haven’t even mentioned the music yet. 

There is something innate within us that is awoken when we are faced with something great, something that transcends us as an individual, that resides outside of ourselves. 

What is there to say? Hearing 90,000 people belt out words as heart-wrenchingly vulnerable and honest as ‘nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard’ on a cloudy Wednesday evening was as powerful as you would expect. Strikingly countercultural too, where does all that emotional honesty hide when it is not coaxed out by nights like these? But that’s a question for another article. Watching those same 90,000 people put their arms around the ones they love as they sing the words of the cosmically-minded love song Yellow, and then in the next moment dance with abandon to Adventure of a Lifetime was a joy to behold, a people-watcher’s paradise, a true case study in human nature and emotion.  

And that leads me to the premise of this piece, which is not wholly to gush over Coldplay.  

As I observed these 90,000 strangers, many of whom had travelled a considerable distance to commune together in this place at this time, I was reminded that humans are made with an inherent need for awe and wonder. There is something innate within us that is awoken when we are faced with something great, something that transcends us as an individual, that resides outside of ourselves – and that is exactly what I witnessed. More interesting than any firework display was the sight of 90,000 people who had pressed pause on the daily rhythms of their lives and gone on a pilgrimage in search of awe and wonder.  

Awe and wonder are admittedly elusive emotions, notoriously hard to define and harder still to analyse. As a result, they have been largely understudied and overlooked. However, the one thing we do know about awe and wonder is that they are among the most precious and powerful emotions a person will experience. Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the forefront of a surge of research into the complexities of awe, proposes that awe is distinct; it is not interchangeable with joy or fear, ecstasy, or horror. Rather, raw awe is a particular state that comes as a result of experiencing vastness. As Keltner writes, 

‘Awe arises in encounters with stimuli that are vast, or beyond one’s current perceptual frame of reference. Vastness can be physical, perceptual, or semantic and requires that extant knowledge structures be accommodated to make sense of what is being perceived.’ 

In short, awe is an emotional reminder that we are small.  

It is perhaps surprising that coming face-to-face with our minute nature equates to mental and spiritual wellbeing. Our individualistic society would have us believe that such a reality should bring forth feelings of desolation or a fear of oblivion, that awe must therefore be a gateway to some kind of existential crisis. But not so. Numerous studies tell us that is simply not the case.  

Believe it or not, we humans benefit from coming face-to-face with our smallness. It has recently been suggested that cultivating awe on a regular basis can ease stress, depression, and anxiety. It can improve our sleep, increase our creative capabilities, and even reduce inflammation. It is a core premise that underlies the Twelve Step programme, an acknowledgment that there is something bigger than oneself, and therefore stronger than one’s addiction, continues to aid countless people in their recovery. Referring once again to Keltner, he proposes that when awe is notably absent from a person’s routine, narcissism, materialism, and a deep sense of disconnection from anything that resides outside of themselves become its inevitable substitutes. 

And what’s more, we actually enjoy awe. We crave it. We go out of our way to seek it out.  

We build telescopes and gaze into space, we flock to areas of outstanding beauty, we take pictures of sunsets, we visit ancient ruins, we study pieces of art, we sing our hearts out in stadiums brimming with complete strangers.  

It’s fascinating. The more you allow yourself to dwell on the nature of awe, the more interesting it becomes. How remarkable that even in a society which is largely built upon premises such as Albert Einstein’s - ‘everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual’ - we seem to have a biological afront to this, something ingrained that tells us that this is not true.  

Of course, I imagine you have been waiting for me to bring God into all of this? To say that any awe the world can offer is but a mere glimpse, to allude to something similar to what C.S Lewis said, that  

‘if you find yourself with a desire that no experience in this world can satisfy, then the most probable explanation is that you were made for another world’

and subsequently suggest that the seen cannot compare with the unseen. 

I suppose it could absolutely be argued that our craving for bigger things is a symptom of our craving for the bigger thing. That our wonder at all things transcendent is a taste of the wonder on offer from the transcendent. And that is certainly an intriguing thought. That’s the kind of thought that has led the likes of Paul Kingsnorth into Christianity, and David Baddiel to oppose it. Do we crave vastness and need awe because we crave and need God? Or do we crave (or as Baddiel would argue, create) God because we crave vastness and need awe? Such a thought could be pondered for a lifetime, and I suppose now would be as good a time as any to start.  

But for now, I shall return to where I started, sitting on seat M22 at a Coldplay concert, just one of a sea of 90,000 people, all listening to a set list of songs that have become cultural artefacts. Each tune that bellowed from Cardiff’s Principality Stadium during Coldplay’s residency there gathered countless individual stories and bound them together into a wonderous collective sound. It both belonged to every person there and transcended them.  

If you ever found yourself in need of a lesson in awe, I would heartily recommend.  

Review
Art
Culture
Film & TV
War & peace
4 min read

Not for glory or galleries, capturing modern wars through art

Mary Kinmonth documents the battles women artists see.
In a bombed-out tiled room, two art works hang in the shape of a tiled jacket and shape
Second Hand 7, by Zhanna Kadyrova
Foxtrot Films.

 

When it comes to war, what do women see that men don’t? This is the question asked repeatedly throughout British filmmaker Margy Kinmonth’s new documentary War Paint: Women at War. The third part of a trilogy, the film focuses on the stories of female artists who have created art in their experience of war and conflict. From British women during the London Blitz to those responding to contemporary conflicts in Iran, Ukraine and Sudan, the film takes a thoughtful look into how war has been experienced by those who have been previously excluded from the story. 

Zhanna Kadyrova is a Ukranian artist working from a progressing front line. One sequence shows a fight against time as her team attempts to remove one of her public sculptures as the front line draws closer. Kadyrova operates in recent conflict zones– one of her series involves transforming tiled walls in bombed-out rubble into clothes that appear to hang from the remaining walls. In the wake of violent destruction, Kadyrova wants you to remember the lives left behind. 

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and artist working from New York. Her work brings together the weapon, the human body, the veil, and the text of the Qu’ran to ask questions of the impacts of the Iranian war on women.  Neshat makes you look right into the eyes of these women– she puts weapons of war into their hands and thus gives them agency that the Iranian government has taken away. 

Marcelle Hanselaar’s work shows the unspoken side of war- depicting the aftermath of violence and sexual assault that many women experience when conflict rips through their homes. 

Women at War brings the audience through one female artist after another, depicting a diversity of styles, voices, and perspectives that range from official war commissions to illegal graffiti. The artists shown don’t even all agree with filmmaker Margy Kinmonth’s premise - that women always see things differently from men. But what they bring together is a view of war far removed from ideas of national glory that often line the halls of national galleries. 

The filmmaker’s own art teacher, the painter Maggi Hambling, says this: 

“For men, victory and defeat marks the end of a war. For the woman, the war doesn’t end.” 

Knowing the consequences and aftermath of war– destroyed communities, post traumatic stress disorder, sexual violence, broken families, that war is more than valiance– isn’t a perspective held by women alone. 

According to a recent YouGov poll, “a third of 18-40 year olds would refuse to serve in the event of a world war – even if the UK were under imminent threat of invasion.” Among reasons listed are an unwillingness “to fight for the rich and powerful – who they see as profiteers or otherwise unfairly able to avoid the consequences of conflict themselves.”

As one respondent put it: "My life is more valuable than being wasted in a war caused by rich people’s greed."

Women have been speaking up for the last 50 years, and the young have heard them. War is not glory, but trauma. Young people see this when they look around. They don’t easily buy into nationalist rhetoric and have no pretenses about the glory of war. They know war is not a place to seek accolades upon accolades, but an evil reality that pays an inordinate toll on human society. 

Today, global tensions are high, and war seems more possible a reality for many in England than previously. Keir Starmer has said the government will increase military defence spending to 2.5 per cent of the national budget by 2027. But Brits aren’t lining up to buy their uniforms. 

If the UK government expects its young citizens to prepare for conflict, they need to be honest about what that involves. They need to be prepared to face a knowing crowd about the realities of war and show a willingness to fight for their lives during peacetime. It’s not that young people are politically disinterested or unwilling to take a stand when it matters. Students at universities rising up in pro-Palestine protests or climate activism reveal that they care greatly about the world they are living in. They want to take an active role in shaping it, and aren’t afraid to face consequences if they find a worthy fight. 

Political commentators used to think we have reached “the end of history” with liberal democracy the last man standing. But War Paint: Women at War shows us that even an end to war doesn’t bring the end of suffering. It complicates the narrative that war is a path to victory. Everyone pays the price of war, yet those in power rarely bear the burden. If leaders want young people to fight for their country, they must first prove they are fighting for them. Otherwise, no one will answer the call.

 

View stills from the film and find screening times.

Watch the trailer

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