Candlelight: Coldplay vs Ed Sheeran

Chaos Collective are playing Stoke Minster on Friday 30 October, a candlelight concert that puts Coldplay and Ed Sheeran on the same bill. It's a string quartet taking on two of the biggest pop songwriters of the last couple of decades, so you'll hear their songs stripped back to four strings and played live in the church.

That's the core of it: Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, side by side. They're usually in different lanes — one a stadium band, the other a solo act — but here they're treated the same way, with the quartet working through songs from both. It's not a competition, just a night that lets you hear them back-to-back.

The whole thing is part of the Candlelight series, which they describe as live, multi-sensory musical experiences staged in locations that haven't been used for this before, performed under the glow of candlelight. That's the setup you're getting: the music is the focus, and the room is lit by candles rather than stage lights. It's a different way of hearing songs you probably know by heart, stripped of the production and played in a space that doesn't usually host this kind of thing.

Chaos Collective are the ones on the night, a string quartet that's taking on the set. If you're familiar with how these work, you'll know the songs are rearranged for strings rather than played exactly as they are on the records. It's a quartet, so it's four people on stage, not a full orchestra.

It starts at 9pm on Friday 30 October at Stoke Minster on Glebe Street, ST4 1LP. Tickets start from £20, and seating is assigned on a first-come, first-served basis in each zone, so if you've got a particular spot in mind, it's worth getting there early.