Set your controls for the heart of the sun

In this job, sometimes it’s great to be proven wrong. One day you realise that your carefully cultivated set of aesthetics has stagnated into a finely manicured array of prejudices, making you blind – or rather, deaf – to the music that you’re hearing.

I used to hate Coldplay. When ‘Yellow’ came out in the spring of 2000, I thought it a bog-standard piece of indie-boy drivel, a track which was wetter than singer Chris Martin in the accompanying video. It was a pretty tune for sure, but basically the first draft of a romantic sonnet by a bloke who had felt the initial chemical imbalances of love, but not the flying dinner plates. To these ears, Martin sounded drunk on the milky mead of his own sappy visions, putting that obscure object of his desire on a pedestal so high she was likely to grow nauseous from lack of oxygen and fall off.

The girl who falls for this is a sucker, I thought. Fuck this, I’m off to roll around in the charnel house husks of Time Out Of Mind or The Boatman’s Call or I’m Your Man. Let Coldplay duke it out with their unworldly – as opposed to otherworldly – kin like Geneva and Starsailor and Melaton and Muse and all the other callow lads forever idealising the omnipresent “she” without putting flesh on her contours.

Consequently, when Parachutes was released in July of 2000 and started selling at a rate normally associated with U2 or Oasis (five million to date – their A&R man anticipated 40,000) I registered it as one of those music business flukes, the canonisation of a band not because they were qualified for sainthood, but because they happened to be around to fill the void left by Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. I had, I admit it, become a bit of an old curmudgeon.

But something happened to change all that.

I was sitting in the Hotpress offices one day in late November 2000 when word filtered through of the death of No Disco presenter and broadcaster Uaneen Fitzsimons, and I wandered home trying to figure out how come the sun didn’t go out and all the monumental heartstopping stuff Auden described in his famous elegy didn’t happen as a mark of respect. And the first thing I heard when I walked into my own kitchen and turned on 2FM was Coldplay’s ‘Trouble’.

I could never think of the band in the same way again. The simultaneous gravity and weightlessness of that song, its cosmic sadness, its stillness, like winter breath frozen in mid-air, or liquid music trapped in amber – all that stuff stopped me in my tracks. Coldplay were one of Uaneen’s favourite bands and I came to always associate them with the day of her death.

My previous carps about their songs sounding like out-takes from Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut seemed kind of petty and snide. And when Gavin Friday sang ‘Yellow’ at Ms Fitzsimons’ memorial concert in the Olympia a few months later, it forever changed the way I heard it.

Later still, when ‘Don’t Panic’ was released, it didn’t sound naïve or air-headed; I thought its refrain of “We live in a beautiful world” the most wistful thing I’d heard on the daytime play-list since Radiohead’s ‘High & Dry’ or The Corrs’ ‘Radio’. After 9/11, Coldplay were one of the bands that could make you look under the skin of Wilde’s assertion that all art is quite useless.

So friends, that was my own lightning bolt moment. I tell you this because I suspect I’m not the only one, and because it might illustrate how music remakes itself in the face of real experience. Like Yeats said, he who sings a lasting song thinks in a marrow bone.

One day a couple of months ago, I relayed an abbreviated version of the previous paragraphs to Coldplay drummer Will Champion.

“That’s the kind of thing that makes us want to carry on,” he said. “That’s what songs can often be – memories of people, soundtracks. I think that makes us realise that it gives what you do a worth.”

We were all born so we’re all going to die. Entire libraries have been stocked on that premise. Entire record collections too. As I write, Coldplay’s second album A Rush Of Blood To The Head is spending its second week at the top of the Irish charts, looking set to equal (and probably surpass) the remarkable success of their debut.

And if Parachutes was the kind of record that could only have been made by a young, furrowed-browed, somewhat neurotic male songwriter and his conscientious cohorts, the new one is a logical charting of how teenage lovesickness becomes a 20-something awakening to the hard facts of mortality – that unpleasant epiphany when you realise you’ve just sleepwalked through the first quarter of your earthly term.

To the left of The Man Who, but to the right of Amnesiac, A Rush Of Blood is as paranoid and fearful as only an album begun in the fall of ’01 could be (the driving ‘Politik’ was written on the day of the Twin Towers attacks). But, if I may quote the gospel according to Oprah, sometimes you have to feel the fear and do it anyway. The record is also hopeful, and at times agitated, leading the listener to understand why Chris Martin would spend downtime travelling to Haiti to promote the work of the Fair Trade organisation prominently flagged on the album sleeve, and equally why he would be so blown away by Julian Temple’s Sex Pistols documentary The Filth And The Fury, recommended to him by Ash’s Tim Wheeler.

Tim and Chris struck up a friendship at a festival last year in the insomniac Norwegian summer, going swimming in a fjord at four in the morning with some Scandinavian girls. The relationship between the two bands thickened, resulting in a support slot for Ash on Coldplay’s current US tour. Chris Martin and Jonathan Buckland also have walk-on parts as eccentric FBI detectives in Ash’s work-in-progress hacker movie Slashed.

“They’re fucking brilliant actors,” says Tim. “The great thing about the film is how bad we act, we’re just the worst actors ever, but they’re really good at it. It’s going to be like Pink Flamingos – it’s so bad its good.”

So does Tim feel that media thumbnail portraits of his friend as a compulsive worrywart are inaccurate?

“He is a worrier, I have to say. He’ll flip from being incredibly confident to the reverse. When he was making the album he’d be going, ‘Man this is the best album in the world ever’ and five minutes later he’d be going ‘Our album’s shit’. But once you know he’s like that you expect it. I think now the album’s come out he’s much more confident because it’s been a success. I think he’s kind of proved to himself that he’s really done it.

“They’ve managed to make a darker more interesting album,” Wheeler reflects, “and the next single ‘The Scientist’ you can just tell is going to be humungous. His lyrics are really simple but when he sings them it’s really convincing. His songs about love are very idealistic. I think he’s got very high ideals of what he wants to achieve.”

So, Coldplay have gotten older and more urgent. To amend an analogy I recently applied to JJ72, if Parachutes was Boy, this is halfway between War and Unforgettable Fire. The blatant Buckley-isms of songs like ‘Shiver’ are all but gone, and like the JJs, the new record evokes flashes of the grainy, rainy underside of the 80s: The Cure, The Smiths, The Bunnymen (Ian McCulloch acted as something of a mentor at the sessions), or those dourer ,early Waterboys tracks like ‘Gala’ and ‘December’, words and melody hanging suspended between innocence and experience. I’m also thinking of Bono’s oft quoted explanation of ‘Out Of Control’, about how you approach your eighteenth birthday and realise the two biggest events in your existence – birth and death – are way outside your own jurisdiction.

“We kind of realised that a bit later than 17, I think,” chuckles Will Champion, a soft-spoken character, but the Coldplay member Chris Martin reckons is the hardest to impress in terms of song-writing quality control.

“There’s been quite a lot of stuff going on for us in the past few years, that made us realise life is short,” he continues. “That realisation that you can’t plan for anything, it transcends our private lives, and we didn’t want to hold anything back for the third album.”

Which means the band are now in the same position they found themselves in after Parachutes – all written out. After touring that debut for a year, Coldplay had but one song left over, ‘In My Place’. Luckily for them, it was good enough for Martin to insist they record it, even if it was the last thing they did.

The band logged 200 hours of session time trying to nail it, but once they got it down, more songs followed, and it all seemed surprisingly easy, so easy they set themselves a deadline to release the record in time for Glastonbury 02 last June. But as the inevitable doubt and mid-album jitters set in, the band elected to renege on that deadline, junk a whole bunch of the songs, switch recording locations from plush London to functional Liverpool and start writing again. Glastonbury, they reckoned, is just one night of passion, but a second album is for life. As Chris Martin admitted a couple of months ago, “The danger was we’d make a half-arsed, shitty, bargain bin, average follow-up record, with songs not half as good as ‘Yellow’.”

So what was the atmosphere in the camp like when the band realised they weren’t going to make the original deadline?

“It wasn’t that tough, it was actually more of a relief,” Will says. “I think we were all sat there, quite happy motoring along with the record for the first couple of months, and we’re always a bit suspicious when things are going too well. What we had was quite good, but we seemed to need pressure – with pressure and panic comes our best work. So the big turning point was when a song called ‘The Scientist’ was written, and that kind of spawned the four songs that make up the core of the album.”

And there it sprawls near the centre of the album, a brooding, self-flagellating ballad about love lost – or love thrown away. Here’s the logic-loop that keeps the band in raw material: Chris Martin reckons he ruins all his romantic entanglements because of his obsession with Coldplay, then he obsesses over his ruined relationships through Coldplay.

For such an apparently unassuming character, the singer has had his share of ‘name’ relationships over the previous year – his date for their support slot with U2 at Slane was Natalie Imbruglia, and he also had a high profile moment with Nelly Furtado. Not bad going for a guy whose inheritance of his mother’s Christian values left him with an aversion to casual sex so acute that he was a virgin until a couple of years ago.

Either ways, the deep rethink that went on in the rehearsal room made for a far more ambitious record than the first – tougher sounds, greater dynamics, bigger canvas. If that was a watercolour, this is cinemascopic.

A Rush Of Blood was completed last July, and Coldplay were promptly designated a priority act by EMI label bigwigs. And with that came all the attendant levels of Internet piracy paranoia. The embargo on the new album was so strict the label asked me to do an interview without hearing a note of it. I agreed to speak to Will Champion because I wanted to tell him that embarking on a promo campaign without furnishing the media with the actual product is ludicrous carry-on, and potentially hurtful to the act themselves, who risk being regarded as control freaks. Especially Coldplay, whose music seeps in through the crevices rather than batters the frontal lobe.

Of course, the drummer, being caught between a rock journalist and a hard place, empathised with my plight but remained mindful of his handlers’ bootleg concerns.

“I kind of get where they’re coming from, I suppose,” he considered. “One thing we were slightly worried about was there was such a long time between us finishing the record and it being released. In the first album we finished it on May 15 and then it was released on July 4, which was quite short, but with this one it was three months and we were slightly worried that, by the middle of July, it would be everywhere.”

Presumably the delay was due to a bigger promotional campaign, more machinery to be oiled?

“Well, it was and it wasn’t. It’s probably more to do with the fact that we were late finishing the record, and apparently you can’t really release a record between the 15th of July and the 15th of August worldwide ’cos no-one’s around. Quite a few of the countries aren’t awake.”

But one country that was very much wide awake and waiting for the new Coldplay album was America.

Last August, Coldplay kicked off a warm-up US club tour in Boston before moving to arenas a month later, playing to crowds of between 5000 and 12,000 people a night. The buzz around the tour is being described by insiders as “massive”, with American audiences finding Chris Martin’s voice and the soulful nature of the new songs a welcome respite from the grunge retreads currently dominating the live circuit.

Plus, the band’s relatively linear song structures mean they’re grabbing a fair overspill of Radiohead fans alienated by Kid A. People are talking about Coldplay’s shows in terms of U2 and REM, and Chris Martin knows it, on a couple of occasions proclaiming from the stage that the world needs a new stadium band.

Then there’s the Jack factor. If you can gauge the level of buzz on a band by the guest list, Coldplay are home and dry. Casting a cold eye at the VIP list for their El Ray show in LA last August 20th, the casual interloper would’ve spotted names like Jack Nicholson, Michael Stipe, Courtney Love, Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow.

So how come they look so well-placed to break the states in a way few British bands bar Radiohead (and, okay, Bush) have managed in the last decade? Could it be because they knocked on Uncle Sam’s door and – gulp! – asked nicely? Well, the long standing crossed wires between Brit rock bands who think they’re God’s gift and nonplussed American audiences might be best explained by San Francisco resident and cult author JT LeRoy, a fan of Parachutes who interviewed the band shortly after their first US campaign.

“When UK bands get here they get all confused,” LeRoy wrote. “Over there, folks like their rock stars to boast about being the pre-eminent band in the universe, and to contrast themselves favourably with the Beatles. We like our rock stars to be rehearsing for their VH1 Behind The Music show in a self-effacing Matchbox 20 kind of way. Okay, we accepted Oasis, but only after they pulled a fast one with a gorgeous syrupy love song that tricked us into thinking they had some American God-fearing humility in their Wallabies. 

“So many blistering UK bands come gloating over here only to slam against a wall of American disinterest. And the harder they swagger and lay claim to the rock and roll throne, the emptier their shows. And along comes limey Coldplay.

“Even though the UK press have raved enough over these dudes in their early 20s, granting them permission to be assholes for life, the Coldplay boys give pleasant unassuming interviews. The video of their single ‘Yellow’ off their album Parachutes is just of the singer walking alone down a beach, getting soaked, looking out with a sweet smile as if to say, ‘God this is silly’.”

JT had a point about the video. The ‘Yellow’ promo was as emotionally direct as other one-shot (almost) jobs like Sinead’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. Yet it wasn’t planned that way.

“We were all gonna be in it and it was gonna be mostly people on the beach and stuff,” bassist Guy Berryman admitted. “But unfortunately our drummer had to attend a funeral the day it was being filmed and so he couldn’t be in the video. So we thought it would be weird if it was all of us in the band except Will, you know, we decided that it just had to be Chris. And it was going to be a really sunny day and it wasn’t, it was rain, so they just decided, ‘Alright let’s get something down’ and it just turned out really, really well.”

There’s something very Coldplay about Will blowing off his first video shoot in order to attend a funeral. All the same, to be called pleasant and unassuming in rock ‘n’ roll is but one step above being a tagged a necrophiliac. No, scratch that, one step below a necrophiliac. Sure, everybody loves Travis and Moby in a boy-next-door kinda way, but by whom would you rather be tied down and ravished – them or Liam Gallagher and Courtney Love?

Still, Coldplay seem to have transcended this nice-boys-don’t-play-rock ‘n’ roll PR problem (despite rumours flying around last year’s Slane site that the band had given their drum roadie a five-figure bonus to mark the birth of his child).

A quick glance over the band’s case history reveals more dirty linen than you’d imagine. Formed during the start-of-term in London’s University College in 1996, the band soldiered through a couple of years of A&R indifference before putting out the Safety EP, funded by Martin’s teenage school friend (and until recently, manager) Phil Harvey, which finally snagged them a deal with Parlophone. There followed a prolific writing period, as the band weaned themselves off Simon & Garfunkel and started listening to The Bends and Grace.

However, while recording their major label debut EP The Blue Room, the group all but imploded, with Chris Martin convinced that the band’s musicianship – particularly Champion’s – wasn’t up to par. The drummer huffed off, and for weeks there was no band. Martin performed an act of contrition by getting uncharacteristically stinking drunk, and when the foursome reconvened they put a strict democratic policy in place.

All the royalties were to be split equally, and Chris agreed to tone down the dogma (at one point he insisted on a no drugs diktat, and to date they’ve refused £4 million in TV ad licensing deals, also turning down Sylvester Stallone’s request to use ‘Trouble’ on a film soundtrack). Even as late as their US tour in early 2001, guitarist Jonathan Buckland took issue with Martin’s overly apologetic and self-deprecatory onstage demeanour. The point being, life in Coldplay is no easier than in any other band.

Therefore, it cut to the quick when Alan McGee dismissed Coldplay as middle class bedwetters, in a Guardian piece responding to their Mercury Music Prize nomination. McGee has since amended his statement somewhat, but for a while it stung Martin, the boarding school-educated son of a chartered accountant and teacher.

“Here was a guy who’d put out really important records by the likes of Oasis and Primal Scream saying, ‘No, it isn’t enough, you loser’,” he told The Observer last July. “I’d think: ‘Gosh, I’m just some public-school boy with my house colours. I’ve got a degree. I’m from a middle-class family in Devon. I’ve got no story. We’re just a bunch of students. I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t smoke. I can’t be compared with Liam Gallagher or The Sex Pistols, or anyone real. I haven’t got experiences as valid as the Wu-Tang Clan.’ I was incredibly insecure about it.”

But the point is that McGee missed the point. The Beatles, The Stones, The Velvets, The Clash, Radiohead: these were all middle class and university educated, the product of arts labs. One thinks of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, who never had a pot to piss in, maintaining that the best place for an artist is right in the miasma of the middle class.

But the English press has always loved working class hero myths – as embodied by Oasis and the Happy Mondays – precisely because so many of them are themselves middle class public school boys, en route to a job with the dailies and Sunday supplements, chaps who never had to work a menial job in their lives and secretly feel ashamed of it.

“That’s probably right,” says Will Champion now. “Above all, I think if Oasis didn’t have good tunes then they wouldn’t have been a big band. They happened to write excellent, brilliant songs.”

Which is, of course, the nettle I’ve been failing to grasp over these past 3,000 words or so. It was the songs that won Coldplay the approval of peers like Oasis and Bono and Ian McCulloch. And Coldplay had the songs before they could even play them (there was a prototype of ‘Don’t Panic’ in place even before Will joined). Songs are the reason the band is currently touring the US at a level Suede or The Manics will never attain. Songs are the reason that they’ll last.

Coldplay will play two nights at The Point in Dublin and one at Belfast’s Odyssey Arena next month, as good a barometer as any of how deeply the Irish public has bought into the band. And while I’m not about to suggest that Ireland has any kind of Clinton-esque “special relationship” with Coldplay, you don’t need a degree in demographics to figure out why Chris Martin’s songs have chimed so loudly in these parts. Just look at the sales of grass roots acts like Mundy and David Kitt and The Frames and Gemma Hayes and then trace their bloodlines back to an invisible republic that doesn’t get much mention in the official dispatches – Dublin in the early ’90s.

Irish acts have long suffered from a fatal time-lag syndrome. We’re no good at jumping on bandwagons and we don’t manufacture movements that can be easily co-opted by the NME. The last truly indigenous happening in this country was the raggle-taggle thang, kick-started by a pair of Scotsmen, Mike Scott and Joe Kingman, which was good for a night in Grogan’s, an afternoon’s busking on Grafton Street and several dozen amazing live shows, but left few recorded artefacts of any enduring worth.

Nevertheless, out of the scene unwittingly sparked by The Waterboys and Hothouse Flowers, something valuable was hatched, namely the Frames/Kila/Mary Janes nexus, which would in turn create safe houses for the current independent-minded post-rock/anti-folk minstrelsy. Thing is, Glen Hansard and the late Mic Christopher were name-checking Nick Drake and Tim Buckley long before Mojo magazine and acts like Geneva and Starsailor –and indeed Coldplay – got in on the act.

Jeff Buckley and David Gray replaced Maria McKee as the latest maverick troubadours to make second homes in Dublin, and for once, Irish acts were ahead of the prevailing wind. When our British cousins started singing in castrato voices and writing windswept tunes in 6/8 time, most Irish club audiences could claim to have heard it all before. Even Ash’s spunky punk attack often camouflages Tim Wheeler’s most starry-eyed moments: songs like ‘Someday’ and ‘There’s A Star’ and ‘Shining Light’.

Glen Hansard and Tim Wheeler made their allegiances public over The Pixies’ ‘Debaser’ at the Hot Press awards this year, but on September 14 on the Atlanta date of the Coldplay/Ash American tour, more chickens came home to roost. Coldplay were scheduled to play to a crowd of 4,000 outdoors at the Masquerade Music Park, but sustained storm damage to their gear, resulting in the cancellation of the show.

As consolation, Chris Martin and Jonathan Buckland performed an acoustic set in the venue’s parking lot, while Ash agreed to do a free show in the Masquerade nightclub. After Ash’s set, members of both bands headed across town to catch The Frames at the Echo Lounge in East Atlanta.

“We arrived at one o clock in the morning and they were just going onstage,” relates Tim Wheeler. “We walked in during ‘Lay Me Down’ and Chris was like, ‘Aw man, these guys are fuckin’ brilliant’. He’d never heard of them before, he was diggin’ it big time.”

Spotting these familiar faces in the audience, Glen Hansard invited them all onstage, resulting in a short Ash set with Chris Martin singing ‘Shining Light’, followed by everyone-but-Ronnie-Wood all-star covers of songs by Willie Nelson, the Stones, The Monkees, Ray Charles and a reprise of the ‘Debaser’ incident.

“We ended up playing ’til about four thirty,” says Tim. “I felt really bad, ’cos I didn’t realise The Frames had to do a nine hour drive to New Orleans to do a gig the next day.”

Somewhere out there, Uaneen Fitzsimons – a champion of all these acts – would’ve grinned like Alice’s cat. Coldplay mightn’t know it, but their October shows could be a case of bringing it all back home.