Chris Martin to Curate Global Citizen Festival for 15 Years

Gosh, he's just the most amazing person.  He has backed up his charity and caring by giving them 15 years which is a long time.  Holy cow, we have really picked a great person/great band to adore.  Amazing.

This is just amazing, what a man indeed,
typical though they still have to tag on the end about his personal life, old news guys nobody cares

The role “just entails going through my phone to work out who to ask what”


Chris call me! I'll help!!!

Chris Martin Will Curate Global Citizen Festival for Next 15 Years

"I want to try to have a more long-term relationship between artists and people who are really trying to affect change in the world," says Coldplay singer.



Global Citizen, the international anti-poverty organization that has pledged to eradicate extreme global poverty by 2030, announced that Coldplay frontman Chris Martin will produce and curate the annual Global Citizen Festival until 2030.

"It really is the pivotal year for the movement," said Global Citizen co-founder Hugh Evans at a press event last Friday. The event included Martin, United Nations Special Advisor of the Secretary General on Post-2015 Development Planning Amina J. Mohammed and screenwriter Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones's Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral), who will be serving as this year’s creative director.

The humanitarian group announced Global Citizen 2015, the organization’s 15-year campaign to work closely with the United Nations to implement their 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Those goals will be agreed upon this September when the U.N. meets in New York.

Evans announced several upcoming events for Global Citizen 2015, including April’s Global Citizen Earth Day in Washington D.C., Global Citizen’s G7 Summit event in Germany on June 7th and the fourth annual Global Citizen Festival to take place in Central Park on September 26th. The lineup for the festival, which will be curated by Martin, will be announced in June.

"I’m Chris, I’m from the band Coldplay, some of you probably have slagged us off in your magazines," Martin joked to a roomful of journalists. "I always felt that, as a musician, we show up for one day for a cause and we really believe in what we’re talking about, but then the next day we have our own concerns. I want to try to have a more long-term relationship between artists and people who are really trying to affect change in the world."

Martin explained his decision to join Evans' organization was due to Global Citizen’s general attitude of inclusion towards all nonprofits and organizations all over the world. "We’re all on the same planet," said Martin."There really are no borders. It’s exactly like what John Lennon said."

When asked if his decision to become involved with Global Citizen might be seen as his "Bono move," Martin was quick to reply. "Everything I do is a Bono move," he joked. "I’m not going to start wearing shades though."

"We’ve seen the power of pop and policy coming together over the last few years," Evans said of the changes in legislation and policy brought about after the organization was started. (Evans points to Malawi President Joyce Banda adding 17,000 community health workers to fight child mortality and the U.S. Congressional passage of the Water for the World Act as two major accomplishments.) Evans, who co-founded Global Citizen in 2008 and serves as the organization’s C.E.O, describes Martin’s 15-year pledge to Global Citizen as an "amazingly bold and audacious commitment to take on."

Speaking to Rolling Stone after the event, Martin reflected on his band’s last year, which saw the group’s relatively low-profile release of new album Ghost Stories and did not include any major accompanying tour. "It was very healthy for us as a group of friends to not spend two years touring every time," Martin says. "There’s now a great hunger in the band to go out on the road. As for the group's upcoming album A Head Full of Dreams, Martin says that the band is "working with some really amazing people," but declined to give specific names. "We’re in the studio a lot, and a lot of things are coming through. It’s a lovely time to be in the band."

The festival, started in 2012, has featured numerous past performers, including Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Foo Fighters, the Black Keys, Sting, Jay Z and John Legend. Martin, who will be using his music industry contacts to help curate and book the Global Citizen Festival each year, talked excitedly about his long-term relationship with the organization and expanding its already impressive roster: "If you really want to get on board with something," he said, "you have to keep talking about it."

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Is Coldplay's Planned 2016 Stadium Trek a Farewell Tour?



Chris Martin has spent the last 15 years as the frontman of Coldplay, the most successful British rock band of the millennium with 18.2 million albums and 33.6 million song downloads sold in the United States (according to Nielsen Music). But the group's future is uncertain after the planned release of its final (for now, anyway) album A Head Full of Dreams on Parlophone/Atlantic later in the year, and a stadium tour tentatively set for summer 2016, Billboard has learned. Still, Martin has a plan for his next 15 years: to become the next Bono.

"Everything I do is a Bono move -- surely that's clear after 15 years," Martin says with a self-effacing chuckle. "But I'm not going to start wearing shades."

Beginning in September, Martin will become curator of the Global Citizen Festival, joining advisory members like Universal executive vp Michele Anthony, Translation's Steve Stoute and Pearl Jam manager Kelly Curtis to book an annual charity concert held on the Great Lawn of New York's Central Park that raises funds toward eliminating global poverty by 2030. As part of his role, Martin will use his rock-star stature to spread word of the United Nations' 17 "sustainable development goals" -- a list of actions (including improved sanitation, and youth and adolescent rights) to help the estimated 1.2 billion people worldwide living in extreme poverty -- and to help the festival expand to other international territories in the coming years. "We needed someone who could inspire other artists to make a long-term commitment to being involved," Global Citizen co-founder/CEO Hugh Evans tells Billboard. "Chris really wanted to take on a leadership role in that."

At a Feb. 13 luncheon announcing the partnership, Martin, 37, sounded equally at ease reeling off global poverty statistics as he did name-dropping his powerful Rolodex, citing Harry Styles, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as examples of famous friends he might enlist to perform politically relevant songs and deliver calls to action.

In fact, it was only the mention of his own band that gave him pause, when he was asked whether he might be involved as a performer each year. "No, God no -- I don't want to upset everyone in the world," Martin said with a laugh, having consciously recoupled with the media this year after a press-free campaign for 2014's Ghost Stories. "Our group will show up and play if nobody else says yes, but my hope is that we don't have to play at all. My strength is to call up my friends, and to work out which German pop star will sound most convincing in ending extreme poverty, or bringing sanitation to Kenya or whatever it might be. I love playing, of course, but it's not like we have to."

Instead, Coldplay's farewell trek will be the band's first proper world outing since its Mylo Xyloto Tour, which grossed $186.9 million from 77 shows in 2011 and 2012, according to Billboard Boxscore. Though collaborators for the new album have been kept secret, the project is expected to have a more upbeat, anthemic feel compared with the more intimate, Paul Epworth-helmed Ghost Stories.

Still, Martin's work with Global Citizen will differ crucially from that of Bob Geldof and Bono -- rockers who have spearheaded cause-based organizations Live Aid and (RED), respectively. In lieu of charitable donations, Global Citizen focuses on unlocking government funds (the World Bank dedicates more than $65 billion a year to poverty relief). Evans says Martin will be tasked with orchestrating pairings like No Doubt's announcement of Norwegian Prime Minister Irma Solberg's $1 billion pledge at the concert in 2014. "It shows the power of pop and policy coming together in the last few years," Evans says. "With the advent of Global Citizen, we've had the ability to gamify [activism] through social media. If social media existed before Live Aid, they would have gamified it as well."

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