Van Damme cabling solutions continues to support the global production of Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour.
Behind the scenes, the tour’s audio team oversees an intricate, ever-moving ecosystem designed to deliver the same emotional impact to millions of fans, night after night. This means every part of the signal chain has to be rock-solid – from city to city, climate to climate, and stage to stage.
At the heart of this infrastructure is Van Damme cabling, woven throughout the tour’s audio pathways to support everything from front of house to monitors and backline. Its durability and consistency make it a quiet but crucial part of the show’s nightly reliability – the kind of component that simply has to work so the rest of the magic can happen.
FOH Engineer, Dan Green, who has been with Coldplay since 1998, spoke about the scale of preparation behind bringing Music of the Spheres to life. He recalled beginning the groundwork “around five years ago, just after we’d finished making the album,” as the team shaped the audio vision that would eventually launch in Costa Rica in 2022. “We’re now finishing up this part of the tour before taking a little break in Wembley with 10 shows,” he said.
Head of Audio and System Designer, Tony Smith – who has worked with the band for over 23 years – explained how the show’s requirements have evolved. “The main system has been refined over the years as new technology becomes available, and we’ve worked hard to maintain as small a footprint as possible while still covering three stages,” he said.
The tour’s A, B and C stages each require extensive cabling infrastructure, demanding robust, flexible routing solutions capable of withstanding fast turnarounds and nightly transportation.
Sustainability has remained a guiding principle. “We’ve tried in the audio department to downscale our racks through the use of fewer plugins and more onboard processing,” Green explained. “The three-stage setup includes a full band rig on A, a near-full rig on B, and a more acoustic focus on C.”
Recording has also expanded dramatically. “We have two record systems based on Pro Tools, and we’ve just upped the count to 256 channels,” Smith shared. “With three stages and 32 channels of ambient mics, it’s necessary to capture everything.”
Green added: “For broadcast, there are far too many channels to send live, but the system gives us incredible detail to work with.”
Despite the technical challenges, the team continues to deliver stadium-scale impact. “It’s a massive tour with a lot of dates and a lot of people to entertain,” Smith said. “One of my jobs is to make sure everyone’s hearing it – that everyone’s throwing their hands in the air.”
Green concluded: “We’re really proud of what we’ve achieved with the sonics and the sound of the Coldplay shows. Wherever you are in the venue, it’s a great experience.”
Behind the scenes of Coldplay: Music Of The Spheres World Tour
