¡LA VIDA LOCA! - Coldplay interview [Q Magazine (July 2008)]
According to Chris Martin, Coldplay haven’t done anything good yet. Hence Viva La Vida…, the band’s very own revolution in sound, inspired by paintings of watermelons and “Mrs Battersby’s scones”.
WORDS: SYLVIA PATTERSON | PICTURES: STEPHAN CRASNEANSCKI
‘WE WANT TO MAKE THE SONGS THAT DEFINE THE DECADE. THE GREAT SONGS OF THE TIME.’
CHRIS MARTIN
Chris Martin has a dream, brothers and sisters.
“I always dream about other musicians,” he smiles, with a blink of those sky-blue eyes the size of almond-shaped dinner plates. “And with U2 or Radiohead it’s always [enthusiastically], Hey, how you doin’? And they’re never that interested in hanging out with us. It’s a permanent feeling of being at school and the bigger boys don’t want to play with you. Check out this chord I can do! Just leave us alone. I dreamt about Radiohead last night and Westlife the night before. Which I think is the perfect blend of what we’re trying to do musically.”
Chris Martin is, surely, the most self-deprecating frontman in the history of rock’n’roll. If the first thing he did the moment he took his first Grammy Award (for Best Alternative Music Album) home was to draw a comedy moustache on it, you wouldn’t be surprised. It’s 12 March 2008 and perhaps dream-state neurosis is understandable as Coldplay begin the task of choosing which of 25 completed songs, and 16 more tracks, unmixed and in various states, will form their globally anticipated fourth album. We’re in Hampstead, North London, in their very own studio, The Bakery, and the deeply indecisive Martin has arrived wearing a crafty indecision aid, a stern black tie and dark blue shirt. “I thought if I wore a black tie I would feel like I had some authority,” he announces in his soft, gracious voice. “Like, if I say today, Well, that one’s definitely a B-side, people might listen.”
Three years on, then, from X&Y – the 10 million-selling album that cemented Coldplay’s rise from winsome indie kids into this decade’s biggest band – and we learn from the outset that dictatorial rock star megalomania has failed to claim the soul of Chris Martin, who remains as far away from despot as it’s possible to go without actually becoming Saint Francis Of Assisi. A statuesque 31-year-old, he is supernaturally friendly, profoundly gentle and radiates with the excess energy we know as human charisma.
‘WE FEEL LIKE A NEW BAND AGAIN, RATHER THAN SOME CORPORATE MACHINE.’
JONNY BUCKLAND
The Bakery is a musician’s dream HQ, bought in early 2006 and the place where “everything” (music, art work, arguments, jokes) happens in Coldplay; a fully functional studio downstairs and a large open-plan lounge area upstairs bestrewn with sofas, flight cases, a circular wooden dining table and black and white prints of The Beatles and The Clash on the walls. The Other Three are also here, chuckling at Martin’s quips and chipping in, most often the winningly wry drummer Will Champion. He contemplates their “eagerly anticipated” album. “When you haven’t done anything for a while you get to thinking, Does anyone, really, actually give a flying fuck?” he wonders, gamely. There’s Guy Berryman, the outrageously handsome Scottish bassist, saying, “I ran 18 miles this morning,” which isn’t a quip; he’s in training for the London Marathon. There’s Jonny Buckland, beatific guitarist, smilingly serene. X&Y saw the end of the band Champion officially calls “Oldplay”, an album Martin now feels was “too long”, which Buckland feels was “finished under pressure [from label EMI], but then they were under pressure, still are”. This time, adds Buckland, EMI have applied zero pressure, “they’ve been fucking brilliant and we’ve been feeling like a new band again, rather than some corporate machine”.
Downstairs in the studio (the traditional two-room affair – twinkling, technological Control Room and chaotic, instrument- strewn Live Room), a number of song titles are chalked onto a wall: Viva La Vida; Death Will Never Conquer; Death And All His Friends; Postcards From Far Away; Thought You Might Be A Ghost. A wooden desk bears the scratched-in message: “Brian is great.” After 2000’s Parachutes, 2002’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head and 2005’s X&Y Coldplay were ready, says Martin poetically, “to try new colours”. Enlisting Brian Eno for production, an acquaintance of Martin’s since 2001, they spent 2007 running through a dazzling spectrum of Eno’s fabled techniques: “musical gym”, playing together without recording a note; Oblique Strategies, using Eno’s “oracle” deck of cards that hold perspective-bending instructions (examples: “Allow an easement of stricture”, “Emphasise the flaws”, “Do we need holes?”); the swapping around of each other’s instruments, abandoning their career-long tradition of starting a song with an initial idea from Martin, which the singer saw as “liberation”, as well as Friday night sessions of what Will Champion calls, “Uncle Brian’s Storytime. Tell us something great about Talking Heads or Bowie!” Q steals away to listen to nine possible album tracks beginning with 42, a mesmerising three-part contemplation of death, while Q’s favourite, Chinese Sleep Chant, features a tsunami of guitars and a shimmering vocal force-field you cannot decipher one word of. By the mixing desk, Martin perches on a swivelling black leather chair and fondles his tie as his chipper mood begins to unfeasibly and rapidly disintegrate. We talk about the album’s seeming emphasis on death.
“Well, a lot of people around me have died recently,” he says, plainly. “Just, y’know, family and friends. I don’t want to get specific. Isn’t it disrespectful to say who died? But I always see it as an optimistic thing like, OK, well, what can we do before that punch line, y’know? A lot of people have been born as well [all of Coldplay are now fathers]. There’s so much to do. We haven’t got time to waste. Carpe diem.”
We talk, inevitably, about public expectation, about assumptions this album might be Coldplay’s experimental Kid A, at which he cringes, saying, “You can’t beat Kid A!”, and besides their intention is the opposite: “I want to make the best Number 1s in the world – and we’ve never had any.” We contemplate Coldplay’s position as the Biggest Band In The World and he cringes even more.
“I’ve just been excited about writing,” he finally manages. “After the last record I felt like, God, I can’t believe we’ve got away with becoming this huge band. And we still haven’t done anything I think is that good yet. So it was almost like, We’ve got the job, now we’ve got to kind of prove why we’ve got it. [Ruefully] The World’s Biggest Bland. Y’know… I haven’t thought about this stuff since two years ago.”
Martin is struggling, hands darting into tufts of blond hair. Q, it seems, has inadvertently brought into Coldplay’s environment the opinions and expectations of an outside world they’ve forgotten exists.
“Because of this place,” he says of The Bakery, “we don’t feel like we’re at all successful. Or hated. We don’t feel anything but, OK, how are we going to make this song sound better? I live one minute away. And I come here. So… the only thing that makes me remember that we’re in a big band is when I remember that I’m married to someone famous. Everything else in the day is exactly the same as it was 11 years ago. When we would just meet and play.”
You feel your fame is mostly to do with your marriage?
“Well, it’s a different kind of fame, that we do everything to avoid.”
So you feel, in your head, you’re still the boy from the indie band in the Yellow video?
“Maybe. You’re bringing some home truths. You’re greatly helping.”
We also talk about coping with criticism, about how he felt when the New York Times ran an actual thesis in 2005 on why Coldplay were “the most insufferable band of the decade” (self-pitying lyrics, sonic delusions of grandeur, opined the writer; “Very informative”, says Martin. “I thought, I’ll get better, then”), and whether it’s the religious sound of the music that people find easy to criticise, their sense of import, a seemingly spiritual search for The Light.
“I have no idea,” he replies, in a tiny voice. “I’m sure it’s every aspect. What can we do? That’s just what comes out. I don’t think we’ll ever make evil music as well as Rammstein. And I don’t want to write obscure little songs. I mean… I can’t. Well, fuck ’em. What can I do? What d’you want me to do?”
And so Q finds itself in the bewildering position of trying to reassure Chris Martin, four times Grammy-award winner, seller of 30 million albums worldwide, internationally beloved musical icon, husband of an Oscar-winning Hollywood beauty, that there are many more millions of people who love Coldplay than are writing scathing theses in the New York Times.
“Well, all that stuff is very positive… [buries head in hands] I’m only human!”
Q tells him about friends in Scotland who love what Coldplay do, especially live.
“It’s always fun playing Scotland,” he replies, perking up. “Anywhere that likes singing is fun to play.”
Scotland loves the communal experience.
“Well, that’s where I feel most alive,” he says, suddenly springing back to life. “In answer to your question, the thing that probably most annoys people about us is the only thing that makes me feel alive. Singing together and feeling like you’re there and present. And so I can’t really apologise for it. I went to see John Williams, the guy who wrote all the Star Wars music. And they played Star Wars, and this was in a room of thousands of people in tuxedos. And as soon as that music came on, the place just went mental. More than I’ve ever seen in a rock concert. Everyone was completely transported. Some people like the challenge of an audience not being completely with them and other people just want to kick the goal all the time. We’re definitely the latter. We want to make the songs that define the decade, the great songs of this time, the music that makes people come together and feel good. That’s what we’re trying to do. We want to try and make the standards. And with that comes a certain amount of flak. But we’ve just got to take it. And talking to you has made me realise that. And it’s good! Time to put the old armour on.”
Down a quaint, olde London cobblestone mews, Brian Eno opens the door to his studio while waving across the cobbles to a figure at the opposite window. “I’m just waving to my friend,” he smiles. “Jason Donovan.” Q peers over at the sight, indeed, of Jason Donovan on the telephone by a window. “Don’t stare!” scolds Eno and bundles Q inside.
In a large, high-ceilinged work space, two nuclear-white Apple Mac computer consoles throb along a table with screens the size of plasma TVs. Wearing a shiny blue and white polka-dot shirt, pop culture’s best-known boffin is, unexpectedly, an exceptionally cheerful man. Over the years of their burgeoning friendship, he’d let Chris Martin know he was no longer particularly interested in full-time producing for anyone.
“So I’d implied I wasn’t interested,” he says, “and then I had a very funny lunch with Chris and Gwyneth at their house. Chris said [begins bumbling], Look, um, I dunno, maybe, y’know, I think we really need some help on this next record, someone we can bounce ideas off, and he’s going on and on, Perhaps you could suggest someone? And finally Gwyneth interrupts and says, Look, why don’t you just tell him you want him to produce the record!? It was very sweet. She’s very nice. And so is he. They’re all nice people actually, charming and intelligent and if I’m going to work with people it matters that I like their company. And I like some of their songs, a lot.”
The sound of X&Y, thought Eno, suffered from excessive digital tampering, “though I liked a lot of the material on there.”
“They’d slightly mis-stepped,” he says, “which often happens with the digital, cut’n’paste, ProTools-type technology. It increases perfection at the expense of life in my opinion. It evens everything out. Dead music.” His lone intention with Coldplay was to create “musical life, the only thing I care about in music, now, is life”. To this end, as a non-musician himself, mostly he “encouraged”, suggesting freeform “experimentation, stupid ideas, prattish things, some of which worked, some didn’t”, Eastern instrumentation (Martin can now play the zither-like hammered dulcimer), and outright discouraged any moribund “perfectionist ethos”. Ask Eno if this album will take Coldplay into the pantheon of The Greats and he modestly demurs, much like Coldplay themselves.
“History is so quixotic,” he muses, “so I don’t really think in that way. I personally think that some Coldplay songs will endure for a very long time. But it’s life that lasts. When you sense somebody living at the edge of their possibilities. And that’s something I think you get with this band sometimes. I think you get it a lot on this record.”
‘I LIVE IN FEAR OF SOMEONE LEAVING. IF YOU DON’T HAVE YOUR SQUADRON YOU’RE FUCKED.’
CHRIS MARTIN
The Bakery, 15 April, 2pm. “I’ve got something to tell you,” announces Chris Martin, “but come out here because it’s a bit soppy.”
We loiter on the stairway leading into the lounge.
“You’ve directly influenced the album.”
“With the running order and bits of sequencing. After I’d spoken to you, it was obvious we hadn’t yet got the order right. It was very death-heavy at the beginning and that’s not the message we want to get across. It’s like editing a film. So it was very useful. So thank you.”
You’re very welcome. Just put me down for a royalty.
“Hur hur!” chortles Martin, while Q is acutely serious.
Today, Chris Martin appears to be an art-school student, his all-black T-shirt-and-trousers ensemble dotted with purple paint, hair sprouting ever-further upwards. Sitting at the circular dining table, he’s painting the bodies of two acoustic guitars that have been covered with masking tape. Strewn around the guitars are pots of paint and two open art books on early-20th-century Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (Madonna’s favourite). Today he’s a verbal sorcerer, intent on blurring the lines between reality, fantasy and art-pop flights of tomfoolery. Not widely regarded as a rock’n’roll Lothario, he’s bawdier than you might imagine. “I’ve got a Girls Aloud fixation today,” he announces. “I want to do a cover of Call The Shots. It’s the combination of being extremely physically attractive with songs that are great, it’s more than any man can take. I think it might be the ultimate form of life.” He’ll invent outrageous lies, “and then I did a line of coke with some hookers and had sex with Neil Tennant”, and while contemplating the concept of a world without music yelps, “Well, there’s still sex, so you’ve still got one of the best things left, don’t take that away, please!” He attempts to explain the concept of his artistic endeavours.
“It’s not really a concept,” he decides, wielding a purple-dipped brush. “It’s just the idea of everything being home-made. That’s the whole purpose of The Bakery, that everything we do comes from us. We realised we were at the centre of this big corporate business so we were, We’re going to set up, basically, a church-fête stall. And make our own cakes. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Musically. Make Mrs Battersby’s scones.”
He’d rather tell you that, in fact, than fully explain the startling name of the album, Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends, other than Viva La Vida (“Long Live Life”) is the name of a Frida Kahlo painting of watermelons that the band discovered in Mexico in early 2007. Martin is a fan of Kahlo’s “incredible optimism; she had a very tough life, was in a back brace through her life and was very influential, brave politically and also very sexy. And the other half… [of the title] I don’t want to explain it! It’s just a title. It could be called The Frozen Chosen. Or, Heroes Of The Ice-Cream Brigade. What colour shall I put on next?”
Viva, as it will become known, almost featured Kylie Minogue, who recorded vocals for one song. “Kylie is awesome,” he beams. “She’s like Girls Aloud rolled into one. And then I took the song apart. Like a Corby trouser press. It’s now one of those half-finished models in a garage.” When Kylie was in the vocal booth, the four Coldplay members were, he adds, “like that” [feigns an enormous swoon]. It takes Will Champion, eventually, to explain the concept behind the art-rock vision, a sort of Monty Python Goes Up The Revolution Down Mexico Way, Possibly Wielding A Catapult.
“The visuals behind the album,” says Champion, “is the idea of a slightly shabby revolution, not very organised but with intensity and passion and colour. The idea of this ragtag bunch of people storming into a palace and trying to overthrow whatever is there. Which is possibly an analogy for the way we approached the record, really rebuilding everything. Home-made.”
Nothing at all to do with Mrs Battersby’s scones, then.
“I can’t help you with the scones.”
Back at the wooden table, Martin abandons the purple guitar and contemplates his now supernatural fame. He loathes the tabloids, refers to their employees as “fascists” and has long maintained a zero tolerance approach to talking about Gwyneth Paltrow, his wife of four-and-a-half years, who he never mentions by name (their children, Apple and Moses are now 4 and 2). This month, Paltrow announced in public that her husband has “a fit” if she talks about him. The pair live in both London and New York and are connected to the stratospherically famous; Paltrow is a long-time friend of Madonna and Guy Ritchie while Martin forged new friendships in 2006 with both Kanye West and Jay-Z, both of whom he recorded songs with, providing backing vocals on West’s Homecoming and Jay-Z’s Beach Chair. He calls these collaborations “fun infidelities”. In September 2006, he sang backing vocals for Jay-Z at the first-ever hip-hop show at London’s Royal Albert Hall. “Pretty great,” he says of the night, “I was on with Nas and Jay-Z. Wasn’t bad. For a little posh boy from Devon.” He admires the invincible hip-hop spirit.
“A lot of these people aren’t British so they don’t have this inherent insecurity,” he smiles. “And apologetic…ness. Hanging around with people who don;t worry about anything, that’s what I love. It’s such good energy to feed off, that confidence. It’s very free-ing. I just think I’m very drawn to talent.”
There’s a spectacular amount of crotch grabbing in the Homecoming video.
“Not from me I hope! I’d love to be a crotch-grabber but I can never find it.”
Have you had a try, just to see what it looks like?
“I’ve tried all kinds of things in the bedroom.”
Jay-Z was being shot at when he was nine, what were you doing?
“Going shooting,” he quips, royally. “I grew up with shepherds and dairy farmers, y’know?”
Do you share any characteristics with Jay-Z?
“I feel funny talking about him. It sounds so ridiculous.”
Mention his attending of Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s recent wedding (the couple supposedly married in secret in New York) and, much like Jay-Z himself, he feigns no knowledge of it.
“What wedding?” he deadpans. “I don’t know anything about that, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
You’re friends with the biggest hip-hop star on the planet, it’s exciting stuff.
“Well, someone has to carry on the tradition of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, The Girl Is Mine. Y’know, there’s a side of me that comes from where I come from that is, Oh, you can’t do this, be friends with that person, wear this, y’know? And if you listen to all those rules you can’t do anything. You can just read Country Life.”
Earlier this year, a heavily-hooded Chris Martin appeared on YouTube after a mobile phone video was taken of a scuffle in New York, Martin wrestling a camera from a photographer after he and Paltrow left hospital a few moments apart (she reportedly had a stomach complaint, igniting unsubstantiated speculation over a miscarriage) saying, over and over, “you’ve got to have some respect”. It looks pretty grim out there sometimes.
“The last thing I want to do is talk about them,” he says of the paparazzi, aggrieved. “But listen, we’re not living in Nazi Germany, y’know, so I’m not going to complain about anything. But I will say that you should ask politely before trying to take a picture of someone’s… haircut.”
This week, the newly-back-to-work Paltrow (we’re 10 days before her “super-stiletto” shoes, worn to the premiere of Iron Man, make front-page tabloid headlines) announced they deliberately never go out in public together to thwart the idea of the “celebrity couple”.
Isn’t that, logistically, very difficult?
“I’m afraid I have no comment on anything to do with that.”
Surely you’d want, sometimes, to walk down the street with your wife? And your children? And be slightly normal?
“Well, I have my cereal. And my lawn mower. That’s very normal. Even though not many people have cereal on their lawn mower. Who wants to complain? I’m a rock star. I’ve got nothing to complain about. I can cope… with anything except hair loss.”
Before he leaves this evening, he’ll produce a slim, credit-card-sized, silver case from his trouser pocket (it’s his version of a wallet, “my wife gave me this”), flick through his cards and stop at a photograph of two blond-haired children tottering down a pathway, holding each other’s hand, with sun-light bouncing directly off their golden heads. A Walt Disney animator, directed by Steven Spielberg, could conjure no bigger “wow” factor. “There’s my kids,” he says.
It’s good to see these children do exist.
“Actually, it’s just some random kids,” he smiles and clicks the case shut.
The Bakery, 16 April, 2.30pm. Today, Martin has turned into a rock’n’roll field marshal, bustling to and from the lounge and the studio, changing in and out of clothes that recall the military feel of The Clash in their Sandinista! finery. Coldplay are filming live rehearsals of the new album “for the internet” and the rest of the band have redecorated the Live Room with wallpaper and murals. The beige back wall has transformed into a landscape of snowy Alpine peaks by deep blue water, other walls show autumnal woodlands and around the window that separates the rooms Planet Earth rises up in kaleidoscopic splendour amid a starry, hand-painted universe. On the walls the word “VIVA” and the phrase “THE KING IS DEAD” are painted in red and black alongside a framed print of Woody Allen. “So we get our music from there,” beams Martin, pointing to the universe, “and our lyrics [points to Woody Allen] from there.” Above the mixing desk sit photographs of Jay-Z and Mozart. Chiming through a bouncy Afrobeat cavalcade Q has never heard before called Strawberry Swing, Martin shouts an encouraging “brilliant playing!” and, keen to get on, “next!” Today, the album is finally finished. It now has a radically changed running order, three different songs (Strawberry Swing, Reign Of Love and the phenomenal Life In Technicolor, the opening instrumental) and shimmers with life. Chinese Sleep Chant, meanwhile, has become a hidden track buried in the album’s centre. “We’re just trying to squeeze as much as possible into something that’s small,” twinkles Will Champion. Coldplay’s Tardis? “Basically!”
The great dichotomy of Chris Martin – angel of belief on one shoulder, devil of damnation on the other – is, say all of The Others, what lies at the core of Coldplay.
“Chris’s energy is what drives the whole thing,” concludes Champion. “He’s an amazing mix of total panic and worry and self-doubt, and confidence and absolute hysteria and fun. And you can’t really predict who you’re going to get. In him is a microcosm of the band; incredible self-confidence behind closed doors but also we’re quite surprised when people agree with us. We don’t expect to be adored.” Ask Martin where his “gift” for self-deprecation comes from and his theories are multi-fold: his dad (their personalities are similar), sex-free teenage years (“I think when you’re remarkably unsuccessful with women for 21 years it affects you”), but mostly it’s his country.
“I just think it’s a British thing,” he decides. “I feel the same way about my band that Bono feels about his but I just can’t say it. Well, I obviously just did. It’s feeling like you can always do better. Like I never quite catch up with where I think we should be. It’s a permanent chase. Great-lag? Exactly! We have Great-lag. We’re always three degrees of Great behind where we should be. That’s my life. So if I sit down at a dinner and Elton John’s next to me, I’m not going to feel that good cos I haven’t written Rocket Man yet.”
Brian Eno, naturally, has the grandest theory of them all as to why Chris Martin – the man he calls “one of the funniest people, he has a very quick, associative mind” – would appear to find it almost impossible to take himself seriously.
“Because I think one lives in fear of it,” he avers. “Because you see what it does to other people. It narrows you down. I was just reading this lecture by the scientist Richard Hamming [late mathematician who worked on WW2 nuclear weapon programme, the Manhattan Project]. And he said a consistent feature of science is that when people win big awards, like the Nobel, they stop doing really first-class work. And one of the reasons is, because they now take themselves very seriously, they don’t address themselves to small problems any longer. They address themselves to big, established problems. But, a lot of the most interesting things happen from addressing tiny things. A lot of the greatest songs come not from people thinking [gravely], Now I’m going to write a song about a nuclear holocaust, they come from someone tinkling away going [merrily], Ding ding diiiii….. oh, that sounds good. And if you take yourself very seriously, you don’t revisit these places. You feel you’re above them. And I think a lot of people intuitively grasp, even if they don’t articulate it, that if you lose touch with those things, you’ve lost touch.”
With Chris Martin, I don’t think I’ve come across genuine humility to this extent in any musician before.
“No, I don’t think I have either.”
Friday, 18 April, the day EMI release Viva La Vida… into the computers of a handful of media reviewers worldwide and Chris Martin shuffles up to the glass entrance of the circular IMAX cinema complex in Central London and looks even more bewildered than he did on Day 1. Today, he’s in disguise, black hoodie up over his hair, eyes as big as ET’s. “There’s been a band fight,” he whispers, forlornly. About anything important? “No, it’s stupid!” he wails. “We’re all just coming out of that little cocoon. We’ve let the album go now.”
We’ve come to see the Martin Scorsese-directed Rolling Stones tour documentary Shine A Light, at his suggestion. Sitting towards the back, the IMAX logo flashes onto the 65-foot tall screen, possibly as a personal message to the fractious members of Coldplay: “THINK BIG.” Martin keeps his hood up throughout and as The Rolling Stones finish each song is the only person to clap along with the crowd in the actual film.
Afterwards, in the IMAX café, he’s considerably cheered.
“I’m inspired,” he smiles. “I wanna go on tour immediately! I’m sick of being cooped up. What I love about The Rolling Stones is their confidence and their wry smile. And clothing. And they just seem so close. If you stick together, nothing’s a problem. That’s why I live in fear of being told to go solo, of one of the rest of the band leaving. Unless you have your squadron, you’re fucked. I’m going to go in on Monday and we’ll make up.”
We catch a black cab to North London and contemplate why Coldplay are quite so keen on the celestial soundscapes Q calls The Sound Of God.
“I wouldn’t go that far!” he baulks. “But there’s quite a big church influence. Because we all grew up singing in assemblies every morning. Of course. When you think about it, the most music we heard up to the age of 17 was singing hymns every day in school. Didn’t most people? In assembly?”
“Oh. Well a lot of places do! Here are the day’s notices. Here’s who's been expelled. And this is the hymn for the day. My favourite hymn is My Song Is Love Unknown. How does it go? I don’t want to do it. I’ve gone all shy! [The title appears in the lyrics to A Message on X&Y.] And I think it just comes out naturally cos it’s been fed in so naturally.”
OF MATTERS LIFE AND DEATH
The complete guide to Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends. By Coldplay.
LIFE IN TECHNICOLOR
Glorious instrumental. Originally a full song with lyrics, but when described by a stranger as an “obvious single”, the words were removed.
CHRIS MARTIN: “It’s nice to not have a singer on the first song come in and ruin it. This is our milkman song, the most whistleable thing. We took all the lyrics off because this song was our only safety net.”
CEMETERIES OF LONDON
Folk-tinged ghost story written overnight after Brian Eno’s assistant, Markus Dravs, deemed a song of Martin’s “good” but not yet “great”.
CM: “I was mortified. But if you tell me to write a better song, I’ll do it. He said it was good but said it in a German way, If you come in wis ze song, it’s finished, complete, great, I will say it’s great. Zis is not finished, not complete and therefore I cannot say it’s great. So I was, OK, fuck you, man! And the next day I came in and played Cemeteries Of London.”
LOST!
Church organs swell over an earthy vocal where Martin is, “Waiting till the shine wears off”.
JONNY BUCKLAND: “We recorded some of it in a church up the road that’s now a studio. In a huge room with a piano and organ going at the same time.”
42
The three-part epic. Profoundly moving piano riff nods to Lennon’s Imagine before strings swell and Martin hollers, “I thought you might be a ghost!”
CM: “Hitch Hiker’s Guide… related (The number 42 is revealed as the meaning of life in Douglas Adams’s sci-fi novel)? It is and it isn’t. 42 is my favourite number. 42 is just perfect. We’ve got two John Lennon songs, this and Violet Hill.”
LOVERS IN JAPAN/ REIGN OF LOVE
Joyous indie-pop sparkler bleeds into bell-ringing hymnal.
GUY BERRYMAN: “Couldn’t we make our minds up? No, it’s because we didn’t want to have an extra number on the CD. To keep it concise at 10 tracks.”
WILL CHAMPION: “We just preferred to have less titles and more stuff. The album as a whole has got the most on it, but it’s the shortest. We wanted to make it almost impossible for you to not listen to it all in one go.”
VIVA LA VIDA
Strident, string-led cinematic opus featuring lyrics about cavalries, missionaries and kings.
GB: “It’s a story about a king who’s lost his kingdom, and all the album’s artwork is based on the idea of revolutionaries and guerrillas. There’s this slightly anti-authoritarian viewpoint that’s crept into some of the lyrics and it’s some of the pay-off between being surrounded by governments on one side, but also we’re human beings with emotions and we’re all going to die and the stupidity of what we have to put up with every day. Hence the album title.”
YES
Mournful strings coil around the lowest singing register of Chris Martin’s recorded life so far, played and arranged by musician Davide Rossi (discovered when Coldplay toured with Goldfrapp).
WC: “Dav is like a one-man orchestra, he plays an electric violin that has everything, from the top note of a violin to the bottom note of a cello, all that range on one thing.”
CM: “We’ve become very good at collaboration. And passing if off as our own work.”
CHINESE SLEEP CHANT
(HIDDEN TRACK)
Juggernaut guitars and what sound like a choir of Angel Gabriels, along with utterly incomprehensible lyrics.
CM: “The lyrics aren’t Latin, no! I will say this, if you take away all the guitars, what you’re left with is quite ordinary. But Jonny will always make things less ordinary. Without him we’d be fucked. It’s true!”
VIOLET HILL
The first single and the song least like everything else: thumping Beatles-meets-‘70s glam-rock featuring Jonny Buckland on “guitar synth”.
WC: “We really tried to make it sound like this great big machine that was slightly knackered. Something that’s slow and grinding. I’m sure people won’t get that! A psychedelic title? Violet Hill is a road in St John’s Wood (North-west London).”
STRAWBERRY SWING
Twinkling Afrobeat, Eastern guitars and a phenomenally chunky bassline that appears to turn into a didgeridoo. Astonishingly, this works.
WC: “A lovely, joyous song. Guy and I have managed to get more groove into this record than we’ve ever managed before. A bit more swagger.”
DEATH AND ALL HIS FRIENDS
Melancholy piano segues into spangling guitars and a male choir exalting, “I don’t wanna follow death and all of his friends!” Vocals recorded in an art gallery in Barcelona that was once the medical room of an ancient nunnery.
WC: “This is us singing all together and then another us singing together. The Coldplay Choir. And it had an echo that lasted for a long, long time. When we did a lot of group singing we just roped in whoever was around. Studio engineers, whoever.”
THE ESCAPIST
(HIDDEN TRACK)
Church organ floats into a transcendental ambient instrumental written by Brian Eno’s friend John Hopkins, who “donated” it to the album. Over the top, a plaintive Chris Martin sings of escape.
WC: “I think with everything this time, the recording, the artwork, the live shows and videos, people will see there’s more to us than they imagine.”
Rock star? Stuck in a rut? Give the follicle-free producer a call.
“HEROES”
David Bowie [1977]
BEFORE ENO: Rock’s foremost chameleon, Bowie had already put his inimitable spin on glam rock and funk, yet by the mid-‘70s drug addiction and an inability to distill all his best ideas onto one album were taking their toll.
AFTER ENO: Revitalised by the Cold War frisson of West Berlin and Eno's unorthodox recording techniques – including the use of cryptic “instructions” contained in the Oblique Strategies cards he devised with artist Peter Schmidt – Bowie emerged as the decade’s last great rock visionary.
HOW HE DID IT: Eno laid out Oblique Strategies cards around Hansa studios that he and Bowie selected at random – “Emphasise differences” formed the basis for Sense Of Doubt.
FEAR OF MUSIC
Talking Heads [1979]
BEFORE ENO: Tuneful, if lightweight, new wave New Yorkers led by angular nerd David Byrne. Debut album Talking Heads 77 suggested merely that they had the potential to be America’s answer to XTC.
AFTER ENO: More Songs About Buildings And Food had its moments, but here Eno manoeuvred them to the vanguard of post-punk experimentation, taking on wiry guitar pop, electronic funk and even World Music.
HOW HE DID IT: By treating each song as a separate experiment: while recording Drugs Eno had Byrne jog on the spot to create a suitably breathless-sounding vocal.
THE UNFORGETTABLE FIRE
U2 [1984]
BEFORE ENO: Four highly strung young Dubliners on a mission to save rock'n'roll. Three impassioned Steve Lillywhite-produced albums had swayed middle America, but they were seeking new frontiers.
AFTER ENO: The biggest art-rock group on the planet. The studio “treatments” devised by Eno and co-producer Daniel Lanois turned down the bombast, adding a widescreen sonic shimmer to songs big enough to take on the world.
HOW HE DID IT: Never one to neglect the details, Eno spent days recording and re-recording Edge’s guitar, even mic-ing up an amp in the grounds outside Slane Castle.
Translator's Note: Finally got around to dealing with this behemoth of an interview. Even though I'm improving over time with the methods that I'm using to scan the magazines, I'm still frustrated that I haven't gotten the scans to not be too tilted. That said, this article had so many pics that I love it. And the interview is far more substantial compared to the NME one.
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