coldplay

BIOGRAPHY

Day-jobbing. According to Coldplay, that’s what you are doing when you’re not putting your heart and soul into your music 24/7, and at some point in the recording process they inevitably use it to describe themselves. With all three of their albums, this precedes a final intense push in which new songs are written, new riffs are added, standards are raised and somehow these four friends manage to produce something more special than they have before. “The only way I can work out how to make an album is to just live it and breathe it every day until it’s finished,” says frontman Chris Martin. “For as long as it takes.”

For their third album ‘X&Y’, it took a marathon 18 months’ work before they were ready for the last-minute creative sprint to the finish line. But when you’re passionate about your music, you do whatever it takes. “We pushed ourselves as hard as we could go,” explains guitarist Jonny Buckland. “We needed to feel that we’d moved on, that we were excited by it, and we weren’t willing to put it out until it was right.”

And it was worth waiting for. ‘X&Y’ is a big album in every sense of the word. The songs are huge. The music is sometimes quiet and intimate but at other times builds to a massive, layered sound that breaks new ground for Coldplay. The lyrics are about big subjects like life and death, love and loss, about being fascinated by the world around us but also about accepting that some things can never be fully understood. “In mathematics X and Y were always the answers, but in life no one knows,” Chris says. “To me the album is about those unanswerable questions, and what you should do about the fact that you can’t explain all the unknown variables.”

But first, let’s go back to the start. Chris Martin grew up in Devon, Will Champion in Southampton, Guy Berryman in Scotland and later Kent, Jonny Buckland in North Wales. They met in the mid-90s during their first week at college in London, and became friends immediately. The band grew out of this friendship: Chris began writing songs with Jonny, Guy joined in on bass, and Will was so keen to be part of it that he moved from guitar to drums. What they shared was a passion for music, and a quiet determination to be as good as they possibly could be.

They recorded a three-track EP and pressed 500 copies, which in 1998 got them a gig at the In The City music festival in Manchester. Here they were noticed by Simon Williams, who signed them to his Fierce Panda label for one single, ‘Brothers And Sisters’, which in turn led to their deal with Parlophone. Four Grammies, four Brit awards, and almost 17 million album sales later, it’s easy to forget how far Coldplay were from the mainstream when their first album ‘Parachutes’ was released: a quiet storm full of raw, real emotion at a time when music was all about loud posturing.

But it seems we were ready for it. Success at home was followed quickly by recognition in the US, where Coldplay are now seen as the vanguard of a new wave of British bands. (Though of course saying this came quickly tends to hide the fact that Coldplay tirelessly crossed the States again and again to play live and do the necessary promotion.) The second album ‘A Rush of Blood to the Head’ moved the band firmly into the premier league, and in 2003 they performed a lengthy sell-out tour of the world’s stadiums.

Straight afterwards Chris and Jonny went to Chicago to write, bringing back some demos for everyone to work on in Liverpool with their regular collaborator Ken Nelson. Determined to avoid their usual punishing recording schedule they worked at leisurely pace, each coming into the studio to add their own touches. It wasn’t until the summer of 2004 that they began to realise something felt wrong. “It had just become quite…. easy,” says Will. “And nothing good ever comes easy. It didn’t have any passion to it, any energy.”

“What we were doing just wasn’t good enough,” agrees Jonny. “It didn’t sound like there was any interaction between us. You can get too obsessed with making it perfect, and forget what’s really important.”

So that summer, for the first time in a year, they began to really hang out together again. They played football and baseball. They went out to eat. They made silly videos to put on their website. They forgot all the distractions of being in a big band and remembered that first and foremost they were friends. And then they realised what was missing. “To be a great band, you have to play together,” grins Johnny.

“There was no identity,” says Chris. “So we decided we had to strip everything away, to go back into a crummy rehearsal room with beer on the floor and band names etched into the pillars and just play together.”

Finally they really got to know the songs they’d just spent a year recording, began understanding the dynamics that made them work. They went back into the studio to put down a couple of new songs with Danton Supple, who had mixed ‘Rush Of Blood To The Head’, and ended up recording some of the other tracks again. Quickly this time, with all the raw sounds, the energy and the imperfections that give songs their real soul.

In early January Chris went to Ghana to renew Coldplay’s long-standing commitment to help make trade fairer for developing countries. It was a grueling trip, visiting poor farmers in the rural north of the country to see how their livelihoods have been destroyed by the surplus produce Europe and the US dumps there. But he says it gave him fresh inspiration. Afterwards, there were another intense few weeks in the studio and three new songs were added, including ‘A Message’, a song that Chris describes almost as a surprise gift. “I didn’t write it as much as it got sent. I woke up in the middle of the night, I ran downstairs and this song arrived, like a late-night visitor. It just came, in its whole form. It was so exciting. Like the last fish you catch before packing up, when everyone else has gone home.”

The kind of raw, emotional songs that Coldplay do so well are still here; ‘Swallowed In The Sea’, written early in 2004 and a song about coming to terms with the death of people close to you; the simple, moving love song ‘A Message’; and the achingly beautiful ‘What If’, which shows that Chris hasn’t lost the capacity to worry: “The happier you are, the more you have to lose.”

But elsewhere, Twisted Logic shows a darker, angry side to the band: “It’s the angriest song we’ve ever had,” says Chris. “It’s not polite. Which I’m happy about.”

There’s the same emphasis throughout on strong songs, but the way these songs have been treated this time round shows a band that is growing, maturing, and ready to try new things. The influences? Over the past two years, they’ve been listening to Kate Bush, David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode, Neu, Nick Drake, Eno, Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, Shane McGowan – music that had little in common except that it was based on strong melodies and real emotions. Apart from the riff to Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer Love’ - which makes a surprise appearance on ‘Talk’ - they stress that it wasn’t really musical ideas they took into the studio, more just moods: a sound, a moment, a feeling.

“With any of our records, first and foremost it has to be a great song,” says Will. “The difference is what we’ve chosen to do with some of those songs. Some have a faster groove to them, some are a bit more rocky, some have more of an electro sound. Chris’s voice is sounding amazing, and everyone is playing at their best so far.”

So ‘X&Y’ is yet another leap forward from ‘Parachutes’ and ‘A Rush of Blood To The Head’. Over the last 18 months, Coldplay have recorded in eight studios in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Liverpool and London. But in the end, most of it was put down in the final stretch. “The rest of it was more like research,” says Chris. “What’s actually on record hasn’t been that laboured over. It all happened pretty fast.

“This album is the most raw statement of our band, the sound of us really being ourselves,” he continues. “There are four people playing those songs, none of whom could be replaced by anybody else. Jonny, Guy and Will are all capable of doing something that I would never have thought of, but that sounds just brilliant. And to me, that means more than any Grammy or Brit. Because it really makes me feel something. The other stuff is nice when it happens, but it’s not what we’re doing it for. We want to make something that moves us when we hear it. Because after all the hype and awards and whatever, that’s all music is.”

APRIL 2005

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