Coldplay: Chris Martin and the band on their 'Music of the Spheres' tour, future plans, and defying the critics — including the ones in their head
he night sky over New Zealand is wide and wondrous, inky and vast. It’s the type of sky that broadcasts Earth’s infinitesimal place in the infinite cosmos. The type of sky that fills one with awe at the beauty and mystery of existence. The type that brings to mind how, from some vantage point in some far-off pocket of space, human difference simply disappears and we all appear as one, floating in harmony on our beautiful blue and green marble.
To be fair, this has meant doing some pretty kooky things of late, from Martin popping up to sing karaoke in Las Vegas dressed as an alter ego named Nigel Crisp to the band launching— along with branded toasters and tea services — on QVC, creating 32 minutes of television so bizarre I had assumed it was a piece of performance art until Martin told me it wasn’t. “QVC was just fun and odd. It’s a weird thing to go out and sell an album.
What he is saying is this: radical acceptance — of others, of oneself; most especially of oneself — takes work, emotional manipulation even. Sometimes you need it writ large across a stadium of people. Sometimes you need literal fireworks. He’d awoken this morning around 9 a.m., still jet-lagged from being on the other side of the world . He’d meditated for 21 minutes. He’d said “my version of prayers, just sending thoughts out to people.” He’d done free-form writing for 12 minutes and then, as he always does, had burned what he’d written or flushed it down the toilet, a sort of exorcism.
Perhaps the idea of a lovelorn Martin just fits the collective narrative. Martin was writing breakup songs well before he lost his virginity at 22 or even had a relationship to break up from. “There’s a part of me that’s always been a bit heartbroken from the beginning,” he says. “Maybe about the world, maybe just about the human condition. I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious. I don’t care if it sounds pretentious, it’s true. I’ve always had this deep joy mixed with a deep sadness.
At Sherborne, Martin was president of the Sting fan club, played with Harvey in an blues band called the Rockin’ Honkies, and was mercilessly bullied. “You see Chris now, and he’s like this six-foot-two, ripped, statuesque, very imposing figure,” Harvey says. “But back then he was gangly, awkward, fey. Hugely feminine elements to him — I think he’d be the first to say that — but at boys’ boarding school, there’s no nuance. They sensed weakness and soft spots, and they just went for it.
As other acts from their era have broken up or petered out, Coldplay’s success has rested on Martin’s ability to alchemize, both emotionally and creatively. “I’ve been thinking about this recently,” Champion says of Coldplay’s staying power. “Chris is obviously relentless, just never stops. We always say after a leg of a tour, ‘Please just rest a little bit.’ And then within a day or two, there’s an email saying, ‘Hey, got this new idea.’ It’s wonderful.
He says that certain events and writings and people have helped him deal with all of this along the way: the voice teacher who told him that, no matter what venue he was playing, he should think about the person at the very back; Bruce Springsteen’s admonition that every show might be someone’s first or someone’s last; Viktor Frankl’sswooping in when Coldplay were at their lowest and reminding them that making music should feel like joy; his children: “Even if you have the most dreamy setup for...
But here’s the thing, the possible key to Coldplay’s longevity and their whole biggest-band-in-the-worldness: What Martin is talking about sort of is rock & roll these days.
“You can’t possibly help everybody, which is such a bummer,” Martin tells me later. “But I also think the power of those meetings is to get people together themselves, in their local scene. And then you leave, and then they all hang out together, and it empowers .” We walk for a while, for a long time, sometimes in silence. More than once, Martin says we should turn around at a certain spot in the distance, but then when we get there, he just keeps going. We pass boats strung with Christmas lights, bobbing in the blackness. “I think one of the flip sides of the band at this point is that the adrenaline is so crazy high, and the shows are so big and everything, that then there’s a real depression crash on the other side of it,” he tells me.
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