Michael J. Fox – perhaps best known among guitar heads for his role as Marty McFly in Back to the Future – inspired the members of British powerhouse Coldplay to form a band. In 2024, things came full circle when he joined the band on stage during their record-breaking fifth headline performance at Glastonbury.
Fox, complete with a peach/pink Fender Strat, joined Coldplay on their 2021 track Humankind, before layering up guitarist Jonny Buckland’s lead line on the career-defining Fix You. Fast forward two years, and Fox is looking back on that special show.
“A well-timed kick can seal the show,” he tells Esquire. Fox, who was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s at the age of 29, reveals that he couldn’t properly “hold the guitar” and “was having a hard time playing it.”
However, there was one thing that led him to – as he himself puts it – steal the show.
“There was a change in tempo, and I had just been kicking in rehearsal. I rehearsed a few times. I kept kicking, and I didn't think about it. It just was an expression of the music.
“We're in front of 300,000 people playing the song. Comes the part where I kick. I kick, and fireworks went off and explosions. They saw it in rehearsal, and they timed it for this thing. So it scared the hell out of me. It’s like, ‘Whoa! What happened?’ It was this explosion.” Undoubtedly, “300,000 people went nuts.”
Fox had also joined Coldplay onstage on other occasions. In 2016, he walked onto the stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, Les Paul in hand, and joined the band for renditions of Johnny B. Goode and Earth Angel – a direct homage to Back to the Future and Marty McFly and the Starlighters. At the time, Martin called the experience a “dream come true.”
The Hollywood guitarist continued his playing streak last year when he locked fretboards with Jackson Browne at a charity gala.
