You never know who will join Chris Martin onstage at a Coldplay concert! During the group’s show in Zurich Sunday, tennis legend Roger Federer joined the band to play the shaker during “Don’t Panic.”
Martin welcomed the tennis star onstage as “our original band member,” jokingly referring to a percussionist who joined the band but left after three months at the beginning of the band’s career.
“The band is back together,” he quipped before they performed the opening track on the group’s 2000 album Parachutes.
The camera panned to the tennis player performing the shaker while wearing headphones. At one point, Martin paused the performance to hear Federer have a “shaker solo.”
Martin later improvised a line for the song’s outro, singing, “‘Cause yeah, everybody here’s got Roger to lean on.”
Federer posted a carousel on Instagram of behind-the-scenes images of him meeting the band and his impromptu performance, describing the moment as an “adventure of a lifetime,” tagging the location as “a sky full of stars.”
“You were flawless on the shaker, Roger. Is there anything you can’t do?!” commented the Coldplay band account on Federer’s Instagram.
Coldplay is currently on its 133-show Music of the Spheres world tour. The group has shows throughout Europe through late July before a string of shows in the U.S. in September, stops in Asia in November, and the tour’s closing shows in Southeast Asia and Australia.
The group has been performing special covers and have welcomed other artists on stage. In Argentina, they brought out BTS’ Jin for “The Astronaut” and Tini for “Let Somebody Go,” and in Colombia were joined by Manuel Turizo for “La Bachata.”
“I was in shock,” Turizo told Rolling Stone last October. “The fact that they invited me to perform was insane. It’s like a bucket list moment for sure. I did that!”
“Chris kept thanking me for being there and I was like, ‘What? You’re Chris Martin. You’re Coldplay. You don’t have to thank me, I should be thanking you,’” Turizo added. “He has this human sensibility that’s incredible. In this job, people sometimes lose the human side, but they were more human than most of the people I’ve met in the world. It was special.”