Top of the pops: How Coldplay defied music-snobbery to become stadium-fillers

As Coldplay prepare to takeover Croke Park for four nights, Ed Power chronicles the English band’s journey from alt rockers to pop royalty

Sat, 24 Aug, 2024 - 02:00

In 2005, the New York Times published an article headlined ‘The Case Against Coldplay’. Chris Martin’s vocals were described as “somewhere between a yodel and a hiccup”. His lyrics, said the author, “make me wish I didn’t understand English”. Coldplay were accused of “topping majesty with moping”.

Now 19 years later, Coldplay are no longer that band — no longer a punchbag for all seasons. When Martin steps on stage at Croke Park in Dublin on August 29 for the first of four shows at the venue, he will do so knowing Coldplay are one of the most beloved groups of their generation — and that the sneers they once attracted are long gone.

Nobody said it was easy — but Coldplay have finally become cool. Just look at the unanimously positive response to their recent record-setting fifth headlining performance at Glastonbury, where they brought out Michael J Fox and melted hearts across the planet.

This is partly due to the fact that scoffing at big-name musicians has gone out of fashion. No journalist would dare put their name to a piece such as that New York Times tirade: The social media pushback would simply be too ferocious.

But Coldplay themselves deserve credit, too, for constantly trying new ideas. In their early years, it was popular to dismiss them as, in essence, Simon Cowell’s idea of Jeff Buckley or as a dumbed-down version of the moody art-rock group Radiohead — four wan, weepie young men whose emotional vocabulary didn’t extend beyond pious self-pity.

How far they’ve come.

Feeling they had backed themselves into a corner with 2005’s X&Y — the record which which brought down the holier than thou tuttings of the New York Times — they mixed things up for their next LP, 2008’s Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, by working with David Bowie/U2 producer Brian Eno and introducing a pop component to their sound.

Four albums in, they’d reached a point where they felt they needed to push on — as guitarist Guy Berryman told the Irish Examiner at that time: “Does it hurt us when critics use ‘Coldplay’ to mean something derogatory? Of course it does. I think the reason it happened was that we became so successful so quickly. That’s what made people want to have a go. In this game you’ve just got to be thick-skinned because if you do well, you’ll have those who want to bring you down. But it also motivates you. Whenever someone sticks you in a pigeonhole — well, your first instinct is to surprise them and come back with something completely different.”

They’ve been avoiding pigeonholes ever since. This summer’s Glastonbury headliner, for instance, was packed with surprises. There was a cameo by Michael J Fox — plus appearances by Brit Awards winner Laura Mvula, Palestinian- Chilean singer Elyanna, Mercury-winner Little Simz and Spanish-American singer-songwriter Victoria Canal.

These were guest turns that went beyond the obsession with novelty that has become a blight of high-profile Glastonbury sets (reaching a nadir in 2023 when everyone expected Elton John to wheel out Britney Spears only for Brandon Flowers of The Killers to turn up instead). They were also proof that, if dismissed early on as toe-curling and bloodless, Coldplay are one of those acts always with something interesting up their sleeves.

That streak looks set to continue as they count down to their tenth studio LP, Moon Music (strictly speaking, it’s a sequel to 2021’s Music of the Spheres – its full title is Music of the Spheres Vol II: Moon Music), to be released in October.

Where Music of the Spheres was poppy with a vengeance, the new LP promises to be more melancholic — at least judging by lead single ‘feelslikeimfallinginlove’ featuring bittersweet production from electronic composer Jon Hopkins.

“One of the things you do in order to develop as a band is to change those qualities that the public most closely associates with you,” is how Berryman described the Coldplay philosophy to the Examiner in 2005.

“Had we come back with Chris singing in that familiar way, I think the reaction would have been ‘oh, that’s just another Coldplay record’. Whereas, we were keen to stop people in their tracks, to have them think ‘is that really Coldplay?”

It was important that a new Coldplay record always offer something different, he elaborated: “We didn’t want to come back sounding like Coldplay. We knew there was an assumption out there as to what the next Coldplay album would be like. And we thought to ourselves, ‘well why would we be interested in that?’ I think the fans would get bored with another Coldplay record that felt exactly the same as everything we’ve done before.”

Hard though it is to credit, 24 years have elapsed since Coldplay’s debut, Parachutes. They’ve been at the top for going on a quarter of a century. But while capable of adapting their sound, the group has also maintained that thread of honesty and vulnerability that has been a signature all the way back to their breakout single ‘Yellow’.

“I remember hearing that song and thinking, ‘that sounds like a hit,” Dan Keeling, the former A&R man who signed Coldplay, told me in 2020. “It’s epic but at the same time it’s not. It’s pared back and natural. I remember feeling the sky was the limit.”

Martin was at that time barely out of college in London and, aged 23, could have passed for a dorky teenager. However, he already had the drive that would carry Coldplay to the top.

“Chris is incredibly driven and single-minded. And because he was a teetotaller — when the rest of the band were down the pub he’d be at home writing,” Keeling said in 2020.

“He’s very polite but he’s like anyone fronting a band. They’re complex characters. If he was in the studio and he came in and thought something wasn’t going well he would get quite introverted and alter the mood.”

The singer has attributed the group’s longevity to their decision to go more pop in the aftermath of X&Y. They showed hints where they were headed with Viva La Vida and then jumped in head first on Mylo Xyloto from 2011, again produced by Eno and featuring, among other surprises, a duet with Rihanna. At the time, Martin was upfront about wanting to write tunes that appealed to as many people as possible. He wasn’t sniffy about being a mainstream act. To him, connecting with a mass audience was never something to be embarrassed about.

“It’s a reason for a lot of people to not want to be associated with you,” he told Mojo magazine. “I totally accept that. It’s a bummer to be discredited, but I get it. Given a choice between the catchy thing and the non-catchy thing, I’ll always choose the catchy thing. I’m a commercial whore, is that what you’re trying to say? Well, OK, I am.”

As recently as a decade ago, Martin was regarded as pop’s most boring mega-star. His marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow was perceived as thumpingly dull — when they divorced there was merely universal tittering over Paltrow’s characterisation of the split as “conscious uncoupling”. They couldn’t even make a high-profile break-up interesting.

Ever since, however, he and Coldplay have pulled off the impressive feat of staying largely anonymous (last year, a video went viral of an inconspicuous Martin stepping of a train in Cardiff ahead of the band’s stadium show in the city), even as their popularity has grown and the snobbery around them has melted away.

Today, nobody would claim there was a “problem” with Coldplay. They are instead widely celebrated as musicians with a unique gift for making their audience feel part of something bigger — for chasing the stars while sprinkling their fanbase with joy and sunshine.