Melody Maker, June 2000 (Live Review)

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COLDPLAY

Cockpit, Leeds

"Thanks for coming," he beams hesitantly. Or rather he doesn't beam at all, as though in fact that we'll all vanish if he shows a trace of complacency. "We weren't sure if anyone would turn up..."

We did though. We may feel outwardly like we've been locked in a big oven by a particularly sadistic witch, but Coldplay have just finished "Trouble" and if we feel anything inwardly, it's that it was several years too short. So, Chris Martin, however long we have before we sweat out our own brains, we want to spend it with you. Yeha we do, yeah we do.

"Trouble" is a quietly devastating thing, sad and majestic, softly punctured with pillows of hush. It gives you pause, makes you aware of your eyelids as if they slow down your blinking. When it ends you feel its absence.

"We just recorded this and it came out really well, actually, like a nice cake," he says. During the songs, largely culled from debut album-in-waiting 'Parachutes', he grins hugely at his bandmates in some sort of triumphant disbelief. Between them, he sheds ton of subtext. His words to the audience have the kind of absolute, wall-to-wall confidence you can live on and the stifling, self-effacing doubt that only real talent can ever ooze.

The songs are set in this bed of unrest like gems. Oh, the songs. The slender power of 'Spies', Jonny Bucklands guitar pulling out impossibly long notes and then retrating into its gift of fabulous delicacy.

The subdued swagger of 'Bigger Stronger', a dream shouted down an alleyway; the sensuous night-music of 'High Speed', a dream that keeps your day full of stars. Chris' voice is an effortless falsetto, melted at the edges, never strained with anguish nor slipping on dispassion.

New single, 'Yellow' seems a bit stiff at first, a bit too happy, but by the time it's got round to the bridge you're swung high on its lazy melody. This band are from an unthinkable alternative dimension in which the chorus was never put on a giant plush pedestal and worshipped above all else.

Most bands have verses that are only there to shine the chorus' shoes - Coldplay's verses, choruses and all exisist side-by-side in glorious equality, all helping each other. No tyrannical middle-eights or bossy-booted bridges here. Tha's what you call perfect harmony and no other bugger seems to have got it yet. The last part falls away, a new chord coming from nowhere...and a bit of your heart creaks where it hasn't been moved for a long time.

'Everything's Not Lost' saunters in like an old musical, waving a Sinitra trilby, saying everything's gonna be A-OK. Then that guitar comes in like an angel sitting on the end of your bed and Chris' refrain glows above it. It's about hope, salvation and it fills your insides with tearful optimism.

And this, more than the perspiration, more than the memory of Bond classic, 'You Only Live Twice' as an encore, we take with us when we go.

Thanks.