The Band

back to Coldplay - Life is for Living

Coldplay are:-

Chris Martin (lead vocals)

Jon Buckland (lead guitar)

Will Champion (drums)

Guy Berryman (base player)

Chris

Name: Chris Martin

Date of Birth: 2 March 1977

Place of Birth: Exeter, (Devon, UK)

Instruments: Vocals, acoustic guitar, piano/keyboard, harmonica

Schooling: University College London (first in Ancient World Studies)

Previous Bands: The Rockin' Honkies, The Red Rooster Boogie Band and Pectoralz

Musical Tastes: Sparklehorse, The Flaming Lips, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Neil Young

Quotes: "Rock'n'roll is about doing what the fuck you want. It doesn't have to be about doing huge amounts of drugs or being hedonistic. It's about not caring what anyone else thinks of you. Rock'n'roll is about the seeking of the ultimate pleasure. For us, that means hanging around together and playing music that we all love and not being afraid to say that's why we're doing it. We're a little too frank sometimes, and not as concerned with all the other stuff as we should be. That's fine, though. We just get on with doing it. We don't want to live up to anybody else's cliche."

"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 on 'Yellow'

"We're happier than pigs in shit, to be honest." ~ on the band's sudden success

"See, I read more bad stuff about our album than good. I really don't know what I think. There are some nights I love playing it, and some nights I hate it. I know at the time we made it I thought it was a great record because it has soul and passion but also melody. But then six months later, after you've played it X number of times, and some people like it and some people hate it... you're kind of confused yourself. It's like a child -- how can you possibly be objective? I would never listen to it. Once something's done, I don't want to hear it again, because I'd just worry about it."

~ on how critism has interrupted his judgment

"For about three years, I was very into survival stuff with my friend James. We would build camps around the garden until we found a dormouse in one of them. Was I in a band? I'd say"

"We just want the songs to reflect reality"

"Everything we do is about the songs. Quality songwriting, that's all we care about. When you hear a quality song it stands out so much from the rest of the music out there. You just know when something is great ... We're not Brian Wilsons yet but everybody in the band writes and wants to get a few more songs on the next album so that's good because we push each other to get better"

“It’s like when bacon, and eggs, and mushrooms, and chips are put on the same plate. It becomes something greater than the individual parts. It becomes a cohesive whole, that’s tasty. Are sound is tasty that’s what our sound is!” ~ on describing the band

Guy

Name: Guy Berryman

Date of Birth: 12 April 1978

Place of Birth: Kirkcaldy (Fife, Scotland)

Instruments: Bass guitar.

Schooling: University College London (Engineering degree, dropped out after one year)

Previous Bands: Time Out

Musical Tastes: James Brown, Kool & The Gang, funk and soul.

Qoutes: "It was guitar and keyboards...we played terrible, terrible stuff. The best musician in the group was really into Genesis. We would agonise for hours trying to work out horrible prog rock stuff with ridiculous solos. We never got anywhere near it - we'd muck about and make a noise." - Guy on Time Out

"Some music comes from struggle, but more basic than that is a fundamental love of music."

"Someone I got the wrong impression of when I first met. He's not as scary as he looks - he's a lot nicer. The dark member of the band. Everyone thinks he's moody. Soft-spoken is better." - Chris on Guy

"It’s exciting. You put that bit extra into playing for a crowd who don’t know you and your music. We try to make an impression, we always try and make an impression. We just want to get our music across"

"We will never stop trying to make our live sound better. You make recordings and you play live constantly. We want to perform the songs as tight as we can."

"Sometimes when you're on the road you're constantly awake and the doing the most stupid things amuses you. How long that'll last for I don't know."

~ on how being in a band has changed him

"The comparisons to Radiohead don’t bother me. We’re kind of clued up enough to understand that as a new band we’re going to be compared to big stars. The easiest way for a journalist to describe a band is to compare it to somebody else. So we expected comparisons to Radiohead, not because we’re trying to be like them, or emulate them, but because it's obvious that we have a similar line-up with a similar style of music. Like them, we're very melodic with a dynamic vocal range. Chris and Thom Yorke can sing high and low with great strength and that’s what people associate us with. "

~ on the band's constant comparison to Radiohead

"Well it’s not like... You know, it’s not Spinal Tap by any means. But, no, we’ve all got girlfriends. We try and keep away from all that to avoid temptations, as they might say."~ on dealing with female fans

"Music is a personal, individual thing, and the fact that we write pretty strong songs with melodies is good enough"

"The bigger the afro, the better the record " ~ on R&B music

Jon

Name: Jonny Buckland

Date of Birth: 11 September 1977

Place of Birth: London...now Mold (North Wales)

Instruments: Electric guitar.

Schooling: University College London (2.1 in maths and astronomy)

Previous Bands: None

Musical Likes: The Stone Roses, Ride

Quotes: "Yes, it's not an area you really associate with music. But Rhys Ifans is from around there." Jon on Mold

"Talented. Funny. Great guitarist." - Chris on Jonny

"If this all ended tomorrow, we'd still be doing it"

Will

Name: Will Champion

Date of Birth: 31 July 1978

Place of Birth: Southampton, (Hampshire, UK)

Instruments: Drums

Schooling: University College London (2.1 in anthropology)

Previous Bands: Fat Hamster

Musical Tastes: Irish folk

Quotes: "Yes, happy times, 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."

"Ah, yes, dear old Bungle, and best of all George - the nation's first explicitly gay TV puppet. I wonder what happened to

George?"

"Will's dad is like the Michael Jackson of archaeology" - Chris

"Will is like a human jukebox, he's more a guitarist than a drummer. Me and Will used to sit on the stairs at our halls of residence and he'd know more songs than anyone. You name it, he'd play it." - Chris

"He's extremely strong, extremely funny, extremely good at stuff - he's particularly good at Michael Owen impressions. What's the word? Trustworthy." - Guy

Also...... The 5th Member of the band - Coldplay's manager Phil Harvey...

When Phil Harvey dropped out of university to help his mate's band book a few gigs, the last thing on his mind was becoming manager of the musical phenomenon of 2000. But that, in a nutshell, is what happened. One minute he was burying his head in Latin and Greek texts, getting to grips with a classics degree at Oxford University, the next he was organising sell-out tours, holding meetings with the industry's biggest names and cutting six-figure deals for Coldplay.

"I could never have envisaged everything that's happened," he says, struggling to get his head around Coldplay's meteoric rise. "At the beginning it was just Guy, Jonny, Will and me. Now we've sold more than half a million albums and there's over 1,000 people working for the band across the world."

Coldplay's success culminated in July when their accomplished debut album, Parachutes - already a Number One hit selling 70,000 copies in its first week - was nominated for this year's prestigious Mercury Music Prize. They didn't win but the unassuming 24-year-old manager was hailed as the "future of the music industry," to quote one record label executive on the night. "He defied the sceptics, had faith and now look at them."

But back to the beginning. Phil was just 12 when he met Coldplay frontman Chris Martin in Devon. "He went out with my little sister," recalls Phil. "We formed a band and used to jam at his house. But at the end of the day, he was brilliant and I was below average." So when Chris got together with fellow musicians Guy Berryman, Jonny Buckland and Will Champion at University College London in 1998, Phil couldn't wait to hear them.

"I remember their first gig. It was at a pub in Camden, a real cesspit. I went along just as a mate. But I knew immediately they were really good." Cue Phil waking up one morning last year and deciding to leave his course to help the band set up gigs using the "vague" knowledge he'd gained running student club nights.

"There wasn't really one point in time when I became the manager. I just started to help out more and more," he recalls. "I didn't think I had the skills and I had no industry contacts. It was a very steep learning curve - it still is. "The first obstacle was trying to land a record deal. "It was a case of persistence and luck," explains Phil. "But I wouldn't have had a clue how to negotiate a record contract or set up a world tour if I hadn't had the enthusiasm to learn."

He badgered music industry executives, A&Rs [whose job it is to "discover" new talent] and critics to see the band. "Every now and then one of them would turn up and whenever they did, they loved them. That got the ball rolling."

Phil funded the band's first release, the self-pressed Safety EP (500 copies were produced, now worth a fortune). Journalists started to rave about the "classic fragility" of their acoustic ballads and uplifting folk. And DJs _ one being Radio 1's Steve Lamacq - started playing it.

The turning point came after a rave review in the NME when 70 record company scouts came to see them play. Phil eventually signed with record company Parlophone. "We just thought they were the best label around with an impressive roster of bands like Radiohead and Supergrass," he explains. The juggernaut of fame began to roll. A mid-afternoon set at this year's Glastonbury Festival drew a rapturous response from 10,000 newly devoted fans - and comparisons with Travis' 1999 appearance.

Their second single, Yellow, entered the charts at number four, taking everyone by surprise. And when Parachutes entered the charts at Number One in July and turned platinum four weeks later, euphoria ensued. "That was a scary moment," Phil recalls. "I thought, 'Can I actually deal with this level of success?' I'd just been managing for a year and suddenly Coldplay had become this big-selling, worldwide act."

But the fear that he couldn't cope subsided and no one suggested Phil should make way for a more experienced manager. "Lucky for them they didn't. I would have been livid," he says with obvious passion.

Only last week the band were nominated for three awards at a Q magazine ceremony - more than any other act. But Phil remains happy taking a backseat in the fame stakes. When Chris dragged him up on stage at the album launch at HMV, he hated it ("that was the first and last time"), although he was persuaded to join in the T2 photo-shoot.

"I'm also really competitive," he admits. "When we didn't win the Mercury Music Prize, the band were just pleased Badly Drawn Boy had won. But I was gutted. I always want them to be Number One."