Coldplay’s LED wristbands: a slush-ballad lighter experience for the e-cig generation

The band's audience accessories illuminated the crowds at Glastonbury - but how do they work, and what's next for crowd interaction?

When they played Yellow, they went yellow. It doesn't take a genius to programme Coldplay's Xyloband wristbands, but the effect - at a Glastonbury that even the normally Pollyanna-ish Michael Eavis dubbed the "muddiest ever" - was to add a touch of closing-night glamour to a sodden Worthy Farm.

The Xylobands have become a proprietary part of Chris Martin's sets, filled with red, yellow and blue LEDs. These are synched to a radio transmitter, allowing them to be manipulated in time with the music, creating vast rivers of coloured light, like the slush-ballad mid-set lighter experience for the age of the e-cig. Their inventor, Jason Regler, claims to have had the idea while watching Coldplay perform their mid-set slush-ballad Fix You.