And it was all yellow: Coldplay in Perth is another waste of taxpayer money

The most unpleasant concert of my life involves swallowing Coldplay frontman Chris Martin’s sweat.

It was at Splendour in the Grass 2011, and I had been pressed against the front fence for almost five hours with my three friends, the daintiest of whom had flown from Perth to Woodfordia in Queensland to see her favourite band, Coldplay. (I was there for Pulp.)

Midway into a tribute to Amy Winehouse that had me wondering if I could bite off my tongue as a means of escape, Chris theatrically flicked his wrist and a globule of sweat singled me out, entering my mouth (agape from boredom) and hitting me square in the back of the throat.

I tasted that sweat as I read Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan’s announcement that Coldplay is coming to Little Old Perth for the first time since 2009, something the state government is describing as a “massive coup” and which also has me considering one. 

“It will be great for industry because we’ll get so many people from elsewhere,” McGowan said. When asked about the cost, he followed: “These things are always confidential because we’re in competition with other states and other places.” (In my mind’s eye, those other places are a Saudi Prince’s pleasure palace, a CIA blacksite, and the ring of hell reserved for landlords and divorce attorneys.)

This is just another of the McGowan government’s tourism-by-event money orgies designed to claw back what was lost during WA’s extremely strict lockdown. Along with the underwhelming and peculiar High Voltage AC/DC festival, there’s a sense McGowan wants a perpetual pub-band Live Aid-lite going at all times, a mea culpa that acknowledges WA is a place with diverse tastes, running the gamut from Coldplay to AC/DC — and let’s say the Grease medley they play at weddings. 

WA is rolling in cash, of course, with its lithium exports being all the rage, so it’s not like it can’t afford to ship in Coldplay for a night to keep the ravenous hoards of 38-year-old champagne-brunch mums from rioting. But the anonymity of the cost is typical of the way the McGowan government spends like a rich kid shamefully hiding from their mates that their folks pay their rent.

“We can’t reveal the commercial nature of things,” WA Tourism Minister Roger Cook told 6PR. “In 2022-23 we spent $67 million on major events. Of that, we know we got a direct visitor spend of around $125 million. So we’re essentially doubling our money.”

But it’s hard not to feel like this is another dollar-sink pass the parcel, where the money ends up everywhere but in Perth, disappearing into the black hole of a half-shuttered city and its mega-mortgaged citizens like it always does. 

The WA government’s inability to imagine a revival/boon brought about by investing in its own arts community is a neat example of its malformed notion of “future planning”. Perth’s music scene and its venues are caught in their protracted version of the opening of Saving Private Ryan, and are in desperate need of government assistance to get back on their feet.

The biggest problem facing Perth as a tourist attraction these days is that wealth inequality has scattered its sense of place to the wind. There is almost no point in attracting interstate and international tourists to a city whose buildings, streets and scenes remain half-empty. You can’t invite people to pay to see a pop-up peep show at a haunted outlet mall and think they’ll leave with a desire to revisit its many liminal spaces once the big tents come down and the circus has left town. 

These little one-off cash-grabs do us no favours. Unless McGowan plans on imprisoning Coldplay on a floating prison barge at Elizabeth Quay and having them perform “Clocks” for bemused backpackers all year round, it’s hard to see this as anything other than another round of Three-card Monte where the taxpayers are left shortchanged. 

McGowan thinks this is another midsized get that will help boost his exceptionally secure hold on the voters — his people. But perhaps he’d best consider the words of that great British philosopher, one “Super” Hans: “People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people, Jeremy.”