Select Magazine, August 2000 (Interview + Live Review)

EXHIBITING STIMPY-LIKE MIRTH, GUITAR BRAINIACS COLDPLAY CARE MORE FOR PEACE, LOVE AND MASTURBATING MONKEYS THAN GLITZ, GLAMOUR AND ROCK-PIG EXCESS...

"Sunshine bus! Sunshine bus!" As Coldplay taken the stage at the new-town community centre that is the Harlow Square venue, two youthful male audience members set about some inventive band-baiting. This cruel heckling assualt is clearly a reference to the Variety Club's Sunshine Coaches and their good work taking disadvantaged kids out for fun days in the sin. Maybe not the most Jimmy-Savile-pleaseing PC of jibes, but looking at Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, you can see their point.

With a moon-faced, saucer-eyed grin stuck to his face and bright and pretty sunflowers aforning his guitar straps, he radiates the kind of blameless, eager joy more normally associated with trainee vicars that the surly, filthy-naughty world of rock. It is, it seems, nice to see such a happy smiling face getting out and about a bit.

With Chris' boundless bonhomie and the band's startlingly astylish collection of leisure shirts and all-terrain trainers, Coldplay are pretty much the antithesis of rock'n'roll as libidinous, generationally divisive parent-scarer.

This, after all, is a band who play hockey and have degrees in maths and astronomy, anthropology and ancient world history. This is also a band who came together playing the songs of Simon & Garfunkel and whose previous musical outlets went by such astonishingly gauche trading names as The Red Rooster Boogie Band, Time Out, Fat Hamster and The Rockin' Honkies. At times it seems Coldplay are less a rock group, more a VSO mission to bring campfire singalongs and regular meals to Burkina Faso.

After the show, Chris contemplates the illuminated globe of planet Earth that sits on his keyboard duing shows. "That represents our sense of ambition," he grins. "It's also a little nod to The Flaming Lips. When they play they set out to make as many people in the same room happy as possible. Seeing The Flaming Lips just gave me the manifesto I wanted - unbridled togetherness. Wayne Coyne can sing sad things and you're like 'Oh I feel a bit sad'. But then he can make everyone feel happy. There's this unifying thing with their music. It's all-embracing. I love that."

Meanwhile, in the Coldplay dressing room, a nostalgic reverie alights on the world of vintage children's TV - in particular, the legends of screen and puppetry who were responsible for indelibly fixing Rainbow in the 20-something mind.

"Ah, yes, dear old Bungle," reminisces drummer Will Champion. "And best of all George - the nation's first explicitly gay TV puppet. I wonder what happened to George?"

George is gone. However, with songs like 'We Never Change' still hanging in the air ["I wanna live life and never be cruel/I wanna live life and be good to you"], the black-hearted cynic might look at Chris' perma beaming chops and decide that Rod, Jane and Freddy are still very much with us.

"It started out as a joke really. We were up at Rockfield Studios in Wales and I came up with this melody. I started trying to sing like Neil Young, just cos the song had the word 'stars' and that seemed like a word you should sing in a Neil Young voice. It's funny how things happen."

Chris is now sitting on a bench in a north London cemetary, taking a break from the Select photoshoot. The rain is falling, but the foliage up above is diverting the downpour whilse a blackbird sings melodiously. It seems an appropriate place to contemplate the elemental beauty of the latest Coldplay single, 'Yellow'. The band's fourth single, it comes after their self-financed 1998 'Safety' EP and the Top 40-grazing tones of last single 'Shiver'. It's surely the device that will jet-pack this band into the national consciousness.

Plangent, lovely and full, with a surging vaguely articulated emotional undertow, 'Yellow' could even be Coldplay's 'Wonderwall' or their 'Why Does It Always Rain On Me?'. As with Travis and, indeed, Simon & Garfunkel, to pour vitriol on such prettiness would be like balnket-bombing the flowers of the field. Nonetheless, Chris is sure such brutish destruction is headed Coldplay's way.

As the latter comment might indicate, the charges that Chris anticipates most are the ancient rock offences of The Posh Background and Going To College. Converging on the capital's University College London from the far flung borders of England, three-quarters of the formative Coldplay met around the pool table on the very first night of Fresher's Week, 1996.

Perhaps leading the beer-fisted bonding was Will, son of archaeologist parents and brough up in Southampton. It was Will who featured in Fat Hamster, played hockey alongside Chris for the University of London team and ended up getting a 2.1 in anthropology.

"Yes, happy times," say says in his sturdy, laconic way. "It's my socio-biology lecturer I remember best. He was always saying he had enough material to give a six-week lecture course on the masturbatory behaviour of gorillas."

Though lacking Will's expertise in the 'penis-fencing' behaviour of bonobo chimpanzees, guitarist-apparent Jonny Buckland did have experience of his school band's heavy metal version of Madness' "Night Boat To Cairo". Thus emboldened and having been artifully raised by a music-teacher mum and a biology/chemistry teacher dad, he descended on UCL to gain a Brian May-esque 2.1 in maths and astronomy. Not bad going for a young man raised amid the Celtic peculiarities of small North Wales town Mold. It is, remember, an area with a rock heritage featuring both The Alarm and Karl Wallinger of World Party.

"Yes," says Jonny, exuding both massive understatedness and an air of deep-set dependability. "It's not an area you really associate with music. But Rhys Ifans is from around there."

Chris Martin, meanwhile, grew up in Devon with his Chartered Accountant dad and biology teacher mum. He went on to graduate from UCL with a first in ancient world studies, writing his dissertation on such musical antiquities such as the lyre and "lots of things made out of tortoise shells."

In fact, his parent's home was not a million miles from Tiverton, the place where Paul Simon started writing 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'.

"I know exactly where that spot is!" he exclaims. "In fact, two years ago, I was sitting there with a couple of mates." Then he adds a note that's very indicative of his ever-euphoric world. "Yeah," he says. "The only thing was, the water didn't seem at all troubled that day."

As a product of Sherborne, Yeovil's hotbed of public-school privilege, Chris is the Coldplayer most vunerable to accusations of Posh Background. But that didn't stop the young Mr. Martin striking up a note of empathy for po' black folks. Soul standards 'Mustang Sally' and 'Sitting On The Dock of the Bay' were staples in the sets by Chris' school-bands The Rockin' Honkies and The Red Rooster Boogie Band. As well as being an improvement on Chris' earlier Pet Shop Boys-esque pop ventures, these combos introduced on Phil Harvey into the Coldplay story. Phil went on to fund the 'Safety' EP and now manages the band. Wise investments both - 'Safety' now goes for up to 200 pounds.

Bassist Guy Berryman missed out on that round of Fresher's Week pool, but nonetheless found himself living in Ramsey Hall, the same UCL student block as the other nascent Coldplay members. Maybe his absence from the pot-black action is symbolic. Born in Fife in Scotland, then moving to Kent with his mum and engineer dad, Guy is the only band member who didn't complete his degree [in engineering].

Guy's musical pedigree consists of playing 70's Genesis covers in school band Time Out. But his musical tastes veer away from the classic rock inclinations of his bandmates. In keeping with his position as the band's sole snappy dresser, Guy is Coldplay's funk-soul brother. Indeed, such is his love of James Brown that he once spent 100 pounds on a vinyl copy of the Godfather's 'Hell' album - only to see it reissued on CD soon after.

"A bit annoying," he says in his reserved tone. "But I did get an old Kool & The Gang compilation at a car-boot sale for 50p, which is worth 60 pounds. I just love that stuff, the rawness and the energy.

Fresh of face and not a man over 23, Coldplay operate as a democratic unit, sharing songwriting credits. However, it's plainly Chris who is best placed to act as their earthly voice. Both in his features and his wide-eyed, utterly ingenuous manner, Chris has something of Spider Nugent, Coronation Street's volubly idealistic eco-warrior.

Chris is the anti-Bobby Gillespie. This is a man so oblivious to the canon of cool that he happuly admits to having bought Sting's 'Ten Summoner's Tales' album and having previously "wanted to be" Bono and Axl Rose - before deciding that he was better off being Jeff Buckley. He then goes on to postively boast about how he only got into "proper music" [Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits] some two years ago.

Coldplay are a band so devoid of rock polemic they couldn't even be bothered to think up a name. Instead, they ended up nicking their moniker from some mates' defunct combo [they were almost called Stepney Green or Starfish]. To an almost transcendental extent, this is clearly a band with no extra-musical agenda whatsoever.

Moving his alread soaked legs out of the rain, Chris smiles once more. Here is a man who has just stood for three uncomplaining, rain-soaked hours for a photoshoot, a man who profusely thanks Select for turning up to do the interview ["No it's an honour..."]. Now he turns his mind to the perplexing issue of the moment.

"Music is the only reason we got into it," he begins. "I dont understand the other things that bands do. We know we're not the best-looking band. We know we're not the best interviewees. Out manifesto is to get as much meaning in our music as possible, but that doesn't mean we have to sing about the coal mines. Take 'Yellow' for example. That song's just meant to have the same sentiments as that Bill Withers song 'Lovely Day' - an unembarassedly happy song."

Chris' evangelical air isn't entirely unexpected. His early days at UCL would often find him in the library, a nose buried in the Bible. "I did used to be quite a strong Christian," he says. "Now I'm more just into the morals. A lot of Christians are really good to people and I think that's really brilliant. From that I just take the thing that, isn't it great to be nice? I think it is great to be nice."

Coldplay's nostrums of nice will soon be writ large on their debut album. Even the title strikes a note of optimism. "We had a few ideas - 'Yellow', 'Help Is Round The Corner'. But we settled on 'Parachutes'. A lot of the songs are about bad things turning good - about being really worried and then realising there's nothing to worry about - the parachutes come out. That might sound naff, but its the best we could come up with.

"This was our only ever hit single and it wasn't really much of a hit." Back at Harlow Square and, with typical self-deprecation, Chris announces the anthemic 'Shiver'. Then something odd happens. One of the wags who, moments ago, was making rude and smart about the Variety Club day-trips is now singing along - and he knows all the words. Such is the subtly strange attraction of Coldplay. This rock charabanc may be daubed with shockingly naive rainbow patterns, but it seems even the cynics are ready to book their seats.