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.