Chris Martin has revealed why his band Coldplay are keeping the kiss cam at their stadium shows, after it caused a scandal last month when it captured a billion-dollar tech firm CEO cozying up to a female colleague.
Andrew Byron, the head of the AI startup Astronomer, was broadcast on the big screen at Boston’s Gillette Stadium with his arm around the company’s HR chief Kristin Cabot during the band’s gig in mid-July.
They rapidly covered their faces, with Byron diving out of view and Cabot turning her back to the camera, prompting Martin to mischievously joke from the stage: ‘Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy.’
Public records suggested both Byron, 50, and Cabot, 56, were married but were living at different addresses from those of their spouses.
The awkward moment went instantly viral and Byron and Cabot resigned from Astronomer, which then released an ad starring Martin’s ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow.
Coldplay have retained their kiss cam in the wake of the furor, and now Chris Martin has defended the decision to do so at a concert in his native England, via Hull Live.
While playing the Sewell Group Craven Park in Hull this Monday, Martin explained that he had a longstanding habit of bantering with audiences.
Bringing up the Astronomer incident, he slyly observed that ‘it is only recently that it became a…yeah. So yeah, life throws you lemons and you’ve got to make lemonade.’
As a result, he has no plans to stop his interactions with the audience, proudly declaring that ‘we are going to keep doing it because we are going to meet some of you.’
He caught sight of a fan in the crowd with a sign that read: ‘three times in three months,’ and quipped: ‘You were at that Boston gig. Well, okay, thank you for coming again after that debacle.’
When the scandal first exploded across the internet, country star Morgan Wallen also made a cheeky onstage reference to it at a concert in Arizona.
‘Anybody in here with their side chick or whatever, I think you’re safe here,’ he said in fan footage posted to TikTok, before vamping: ‘I don’t condone cheating…anymore.’
Paltrow then sent fans into a frenzy by joining Astronomer as a ‘temporary spokesperson’ and starring in a video for their LinkedIn.
‘Astronomer has got a lot of questions in the last few days, and they wanted me to answer the most common ones,’ she said, prompting some text to appear on the screen showing one such query that began: ‘OMG! What the actual f**k.’
The text was then quickly cut off and Paltrow reappeared onscreen, deadpanning: ‘Yes! Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow. We’ve been thrilled to see so many people suddenly interested in data workflow automation.’
In late July, Cabot was glimpsed for the first time since the controversy broke, watering the flowers and shrubs at her home in Rye, New Hampshire.
She was without her wedding ring at that stage, but the state of her marriage to her husband – Privateer Rum CEO Andrew Cabot, 60, who is an heir to the $15.4billion Cabot family fortune – remains unknown.
The same is true of Andy Byron’s marriage to his wife Megan Kerrigan, who shut down her social media accounts when the kiss cam footage went viral.