One of the world’s biggest music acts insisted there was “no disrespect to Watford” after writing a new song for their rivals.

Coldplay played a new song called Orange during BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend in tribute to Luton Town FC.

When it was announced that the chart-topping band would be headlining the event at Stockwood Park, some Hatters fans raised concerns that “they can’t perform the song Yellow because Watford play in yellow”.

There were calls for a lyric change to ‘orange’ but instead frontman Chris Martin played a one-off new song named for the colour.

Martin told the crowd they could “relax”, before saying he had been reading the “papers”, which was apparently unusual for him as they are “not a reliable source” about his life.

Whether this included the tongue-in-cheek Watford Observer article titled ‘Coldplay lyric change call to 'honour' Luton mocked in Watford’ is not clear.

He added: “So they said, ‘There’s a campaign, they want to kill you and you’re never going to make it out of Luton alive’, and I said, ‘That would be a great way to go, and that would cement our legacy forever and that would be a great movie’. And so I’m OK if they kill me.

“But if they don’t, maybe we’ll get to the end of this show, the end of the concert, and I can say, ‘Thank you so much for singing the song Yellow even though it went against all of your principles’.”

He added that the “new song” appeared “last night” and called it a “once-in-a-lifetime thing” as it was not professionally produced, and “may not be good enough” to be heard again.

Watford Observer: Chris Martin of Coldplay.Chris Martin of Coldplay. (Image: Tabatha Fireman/PA)

Orange featured the lyrics: “It’s hard to be a football fan here in Luton town. Sometimes you do the best you can, still you find you’re going down.

“We didn’t win all our matches, we didn’t win the cup.

“But when you get knocked down in Luton, you always get back up.

“So you can come in singing Yellow, that’s all right with me, I prefer a warmer colour spelt o-r-a-n-g-e.”

Martin burst into a chorus of “I love you Luton”, then claimed there was “no disrespect to Watford”.