that scooter is gwyneth's. i think and i don't think guy has a ferrari. just new land rover, and as for spending money he's the freakiest :lol: , he gets all kinds of gadgets and old music stuff

^ I think you're right. He spends money on jukeboxes and his in-house studio. I bet he brings all kinds of techy gadgets or old vinlys home all the time. His wife must be thinking: 'where in the hell are we going to put THAT?' :lol:

That's so cool though. I'd be doing the same thing! But I have no interest in cars -- just the in-house studio stuff.

guy's not into cars too much, except his baby rover :lol:

Haha. That's what he should have said when J Ross asked if they had any kids.

:lol: :lol: :lol:

I read somewhere that Guy has a red ferrari...maybe a magazine

Yup, I've read that too!

Oh do you remember what magazine it was??

i'm almost sure that guy doesn't have ferrari.

He does, according to a magazine, Q I think. They said he has a red Dino.

^yes, magazine Q

 

i have the interview. i will have to look for it

oh please, go look

16 DECEMBER 2004. AFTERNOON, LONDON: In the cramped stairwell Sarm West studios in Notting Hill where Coldplay are completing their third album, Chris Martin is giving me a grilling. I've just heard nine of their new songs. "Which did you like?" he urges, rope-body curved against the wall, fingers drumming on the banister. "No, wait...Which didn't you like? Honesty through negativity - which ones were crap?"

 

Well, all the songs seemed good to me, I say. He pulls a face. So I admit that I didn't like one - The Hardest Part - as much as the others.

 

"You're wrong about that," he counters, "though it is derivative. "

 

It sounds like your old stuff, I say.

 

"It sounds like R.E.M.'s old stuff," he quips. "What did you like on the last album? The last album was perfect, wasn't it? No one except us can be completely honest. You wouldn't say if you thought all the new songs were just mediocre. Maybe we could release the record, find out which songs everyone likes, then take it back and make it better... Anyway, I don't want you to say anything, cos it won't change my mind."

 

The Scientist, I say, faintly.

 

"We haven't written a song like that!" he yelps. "And we haven't written one like Ashes To Ashes or Bitter Sweet Symphony. And you can't set out to write a song like that because it doesn't work... "

 

A couple of steps down, guitarist Jonny Buckland starts laughing.

 

"We've got to stop," he murmurs. "We really have."

 

CHRISTMAS IS COMING and the goose is assessed to be both fat and nearing its sell-by date. Coldplay have been working on the follow-up to their seven-times-platinum A Rush Of Blood To The Head since the end of 2003; taking just a week off after that album's 16-month tour, they've been in the studio ever since. Considering that Parachutes took six weeks to record, and A Rush Of Blood... six months, this has been a marathon effort. And EMI's beancounters are getting edgy.

 

There are signs that the record company is creaking into business: a pressure to choose the first single, to confirm tour dates and video venue, to announce when, exactly, this new album will come out. An article in industry bible Music Week reads, "the first quarter of next year is set to deliver a series of new superstar albums by the likes of Coldplay". Earlier, Martin picked it up, put it down, picked it up again. "That statement is bizarre to me," he said. "Because they're talking about something that doesn't exist yet... "

 

Coldplay are not a prima donna band. Martin is famous, so he gets attention, plus his switchback moods require high maintenance; but Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman and Will Champion, who plays drums, could cartwheel naked from The Groucho Club without risk of paparazzi flash. Their tempers appear even; their body language set to everyday. They look like your (tall) mates. Though a closer inspection reveals that Champion's lowkey outfit is highly labelled and Berryman owns some very fancy cars (Ferrari Dino, Mr Clarkson?). Buckland has a hangover.

 

Still, despite their calm and the reassuringly sing-along nature of the new material (What If, Low and Swallowed In The Sea stand out after just one listen), there's an odd atmosphere winding through this small studio. Mostly generated by 28-year-old Martin. His bubbliness borders on mania, he fizzes with quips, flips between Noel confidence and Robbie paranoia. "This is going to kick everyone else away" morphs quickly to "We're due a backlash, aren't we?" Coldplay's instant and constant success is a pressure: since signing to Parlophone in 1999, they've never been anywhere but on top - five short years has already brought them four Grammys and over 16 million album sales. Martin is going round in circles, skewered by his own high standards and everyone else's expectations. So, let's spin him out.

 

Do you realise that if this album does well, you'll be the biggest band in the world?

 

"But that's not how I think about it!" he urges. His fingers are drumming again. "I don't see it as competing against any other person, I just see it as pushing what we can do as far as we can, because we should at this point. And I've got money and I've met Steven Spielberg, who I very much like, and I understand that the fame and fortune thing is a myth, and if we were just making records to get that we wouldn't be happy. We could have released an album 10 months ago with enough hit singles on it, but it wouldn't have done anything for us...

 

"What matters is trying to write the best tunes in the world. And having a picture of U2 on the wall, and trying to pump enough logs to take out the Drago [the Russian villain in Rocky IV] that is U2 - that's our mission. I don't care about being big, I don't care about being famous, I care about being a streamlined fighting machine."

 

Taking out U2? Like I said: poised to be the biggest band in the world.

 

21 JANUARY 2005. LUNCHTIME, LONDON: If you walk to Coldplay's studio from the Tube station, you pass a row of shops. The other day, as the band were ambling past, they heard the chink of sovereign ring on glass. There was a man in a window, making an internationally understood hand gesture at Chris Martin. So he went into the shop, and said, "Why are you doing that?" And the man, who was talking on his mobile, said, "You're a wanker, your music's shite and I'm sick of seeing your face in my fucking paper every day." The rest of the band had to pull their singer away: "Do you think I want to be in your paper, you twat? I hate it and do everything to avoid it!" They went to play snooker: Martin wanted to go back and wage battle with a cue, but, instead, the next day, popped into the shop with a bottle of champagne. He had a friendly chat with the bloke and everything seems to be OK now.

 

Even when all four members are together, people think that Coldplay is just Chris Martin: and the attention has been worse since he met and married Gwyneth Paltrow. Of course, without Martin's drive and songs, Coldplay wouldn't exist; still, the band is just that - a band. They split royalties equally, and are noticeably democratic when working: if anyone adds anything to a track, the rest hear it before it's passed.

 

Jonny Buckland, 27, is a modest, scruffy, clever bloke, an astronomer who enjoys a drink and football (he supports Spurs). He's also the closest to Martin, his "would-be gay lover" (according to Martin), the one who hears the songs second, who works on them with him until they're ready to play to someone else. Rhythm section Berryman an Champion are the reality check, especially Champion: "I'll know when this album is finished - when he's excited about it," says Martin. Twenty-six-year-old Will Champion is his own man, self-contained, not prone to binges or extremes, though he can get overexcited about Southampton FC. Within Coldplay, he's learnt to temper his opinions: too negative, too soon, and Martin will throw out a song before it's even developed. And Guy Berryman, 27, Scottish, is the mad-haired rock'n'roller who adds the funk, the only one who didn't finish university, who spends his money on cars and "poorly made, Italian designer furniture". Always up for a late night, often with Buckland, Berryman admits he's "a terrible drunk. Well, when I'm drinking Stella. No one lets me drink it any more because I become a twat."

 

So, how to remind the world that these three musicians exist? Conversely: is more attention really what they want?

 

Buckland: "It doesn't worry me if people think we don't do much, because I know we all work on everything together. I worry for the amount Chris is hassled by the paparazzi. We can go up to paps and push them away."

 

Champion: "It would be foolish of me to pretend that I was the band's driving force. Chris is single-minded, he's focused 24 hours a day. I've got a short attention-span and want to switch off when I get home. Part of me wants to remain hidden but that puts a lot of pressure on Chris."

 

Berryman: "At first, when Chris got all the attention, I was jealous, but when you realise how much hassle it is, the appeal wears off. We've got to make more of an effort to present ourselves as four this time. It's hard, though, because if you're in The Darkness you can make yourselves look the same by looking mad. We've got jeans and T-shirts and Clarks shoes."

 

Back in the studio, the pre-Christmas tension has eased a little. EMI have called off the hounds, allowing the album, originally due by April, to be released in June: a significant move, because, in tax terms, it's moved into the next fiscal year. EMI's shares slump by 16 per cent as a result. Not that Coldplay care. The album has a name now - X&Y - and they've spent the last two weeks working with producer Danton Supple ironing out pre-mixing sonic niggles, the kind of dogwhistle alterations that only bands can hear. And Martin's demeanour is different: still roller-coasting, but there seem to be more peaks than troughs. Over Christmas, he gave copies of the unfinished album to Danny McNamara of Embrace, Ash's Tim Wheeler and "one to my friend in America, a film guy" (brother-in-law Jake Paltrow). All came back with the same analysis: this album is almost there, and it's going to be great, but it's missing something. A song. just a really simple song.

 

24 JANUARY 2005. EARLY EVENING, LONDON: Chris Martin comes striding into a freezing South Bank café. He's in an "up" mood. In a few hours, he's appearing on a live Channel 4 debate called After The Tsunami, to talk about aid to developing countries. "I've just been to Ghana with Oxfam and this is press after that," he says, over a selection of meze-style veggie nibbles. "You know, for me, it was either Pepsi or Fair Trade, and Oxfam offered me £12 million. So here I am!"

 

We talk about X&Y for a bit. Martin believes that his best songs are "sent", as in he doesn't know how they happen: so, when the reports came in that X&Y was missing a track, he was quite irritated. The album has been a slog. Recording started in early 2004 in New York, with Coldplay's usual producer, Ken Nelson, but things didn't come together until after August, when the band decided they needed to rehearse all the new songs - play them as a band, rather than piece them together in the studio.

 

Anyhow, the new track: Martin had had an idea based on a hymn called My Song Is Love Unknown - "a heartbreaker" but hadn't followed it up. Earlier in the month, he was at home, at two in the morning, talking about the album "with someone", and the hymn idea came up again, "because someone was saying maybe you should try and write that other song". He lost his temper - "I've broken my back over this record! " - but then decided, right, he was going to do it. "So I went downstairs and sat with the guitar, and in five minutes it came. It's brilliant. And it was the first song [A Message] I've ever written without any clothes on. Makes it freer."

 

When I'm recording a conversation, if Martin says "someone" or "people", he tends to mean his wife. In the four months I dip in and out of Coldplay world, Gwyneth Paltrow is ever-present, but not visible; apart from once, at the end of a long day in the studio. It's understandable, when you realise just how much the couple's getting together has weighted their lives. Towards the end of 2003 and during the first six months of 2004 - the period in which they got married and Paltrow gave birth to their daughter, Apple - they were besieged.

 

"I don't talk about my private life and I think that's fair enough," says Martin, carefully. "But the one thing I will say I've learnt over the last year is that there are some genuine cunts around. I never wanted to believe it. Two years ago I would have said, Alan McGee's such a knob, now I don't believe that. It's fine to have banter between bands, there are worse people out there."

 

Who do you mean? The paparazzi? Have they altered your life so much?

 

"They don't alter your real life. But it's horrible on a day-to-day basis, not being able to walk around, having some guy running around you with a camera and abusing you. I just find it unfair that, in my line of work, you can't physically fight with anyone. In medieval times, you'd just run them through with your sword."

 

Have you ever hit any of them?

 

"I've never hit anyone. I've tripped someone up, I got in trouble about that. He was chasing after somebody and I didn't like it, so we were running along together and he fell over. I wasn't put in a police cell, but I got fingerprinted. Police stations are terrifying. I'm petrified about losing any of the things I care about: family, band, hair, freedom. All I'll say is that they're fucking bastards - not the police, the paparazzi."

 

What about the public?

 

"Oh, no one really bothers me, I go on the Tube, I go everywhere. I don't get hassled. One thing I really like doing at the moment is walking around London late at night, with my hood on. You look like a drug dealer. People don't think you're a pop star, so they treat you like they treat other people and that to me is - it's just the way I try and keep normal. Does that sound very pretentious?"

 

No. It sounds quite risky, though.

 

"It's good for me, I think. Except, last night, I made the mistake of trying to go for a walk in Hyde Park and I was climbing over the fence and another solo guy was climbing out. And he was like, Careful, there's a police car... I thought, Hmm. If I'm not careful, I'm going to have to make up some excuse about walking my dog. So I was like, OK, I'll stay on the street..."

 

It's time for Martin to go to the Channel 4 debate. We meet an Oxfam representative in another café, who briefs him (he doesn't really listen), and then all walk round the corner to the TV studios. In the green room, Martin spends his time writing a letter in my notebook to Tony Blair. I'm interviewing the Prime Minister tomorrow for another magazine, so he's decided to use me as a courier.

 

He starts the letter about three times, coiling himself around the book like a student stopping a cheat from copying his Latin prep (he's lefthanded). Finally done, he folds the paper up tightly and gives it to me. It reads:

 

Dear Mr Blair, My name is Chris; I am the singer in a band called Coldplay. Please forgive the slightly ramshackle nature of my letter; I don't have any smart stationery. A little later: I think all the stuff you are doing this year in terms of trying to sort the whole place out is BRILLIANT The Make Poverty History campaign that you're behind is not just a slogan, it's a real possibility, and myself and most of my friends feel like you're one of the only politicians on the world stage who gives a [last two words crossed out] actually wants to achieve it.

 

Then he wishes Blair good luck in the election, offers him some guitar lessons and signs off, leaving his mobile number. (When I give the note to the Prime Minister the following day, he says, "Have you read this?" I say, "Of course. " The day after that, Chris gets an official phone call: he doesn't tell me what was said, but I get the impression that it was more of a "So, can we rely on your support?" chat than a "How do you get your fingers round an augmented fifth?" one).

 

Martin is ushered into the studio during a commercial break, to speak after a chubby American analyst who is so anti-aid to Africa, such a pantomime baddy, that the audience starts giggling. When he's done, Jon Snow turns to Martin and says, "Chris, you've just been to Ghana, what does it look like on the ground?" "Well," he says, deliberately, "the people were a lot thinner than that guy.

 

15 FEBRUARY 2005. AFTERNOON, NEW YORK: In a windowless playroom, next door to a windowless mixing studio, high up above Times Square, Will Champion is chucking some darts. Chris Martin is lying on a sofa, watching Live Aid on DVD; Jonny Buckland and Guy Berryman are nowhere to be seen. In the studio itself, engineer Michael Brauer is sliding levers and flipping buttons on the master-board.

 

Martin bounds up: "Come and buy some CDs and chocolate!" he enthuses. In Virgin Megastore, he scoots about, buying Kanye West and Green Day albums for himself, and Bloc Party and Bright Eyes for me. Then it's next door for supplies: a big slab of dark chocolate and a juice drink.

We talk in the corridor of the mixing studio: Chris sits on the floor and munches through his choccy bar. I want to talk about how different he is to his accepted persona. The tabloid Chris is a soggy, smug, macrobiotic, right-on stiff; the real one is far more interesting - more mad professor, more passionate and funny, more temperamental and artistically, autistically focused. Notions rustle through his mind like the fluttering pages of a flickbook. He hates talking about himself, but admits, "I think it's strange when we're called bland, because everything in my life is extreme colour: it's either amazing or it's shit.

 

What do you think the misconceptions about Coldplay are?

 

"Well, first, they don't come from ordinary people, and second, misconceptions are irrelevant, because it all boils down to whether someone can relate to your songs. If I was singing: [sings] What colour shall I paint the living room?/ Blue suggests sappiness, black suggests doom - I could write an album like that, but it wouldn't be relevant to a 19-year-old in Folkestone with girl problems. And girl problems are always there, I don't think men and women understand each other. Though I think they do their very best."

 

Still, as a band, you all settled down relatively young... [Martin, Cbampion and Berryman are all married; Buckland lives witb his girlfriend.]

 

"I don't think that once you get married, you just sit back and relax. I'm obsessed with writing the greatest song ever, and trying to make your relationship better, or why your friend's mum just died. So I've got an awful lot of questions, but on a family level, yes, I'm married and I have a baby and it's amazing. But that doesn't mean I don't live in the same world as everyone else, experience death and disease and natural disasters and terrorism and cancer and... traffic problems."

 

So you and Gwyneth don't eat macrobiotic meals naked?

 

"No. But when I talk about the tariff barriers on Ghanaian rice - I always do that with no clothes on."

 

He's getting wound up - at one point, he blurts out, "What's the point of making a brilliant album if you're just going to be dismissed as a cartoon? " but then reassures himself. "There's worse things happening in the world by a trillion miles. When we're all dead, I'll be lying next to this person who's written this bullshit about me."

 

What do you think happens when you die?

 

"Well, obviously a Best Of," he says. "Maybe Jonny will get someone to hammer out a few tunes at the Albert Hall."

 

We go back into the playroom. Martin's mood, upbeat during our talk, darkens dramatically and instantaneously. He can't seem to look at me, stomps to the CD player, flips through one Bloc Party track, turns his back and, without a word, disappears into the studio. "Chocolate crash," shrugs Champion, evenly. "Don't worry about it." So the press officer and I make ourselves scarce: when we return, the whole band is there, relaxed, dart-playing. Berryman has a rotten hangover. They talk music: "Too much reverb on the vocals?" "Better sitting right on the strings? But Martin is still acting weirdly, flouncing silently into the studio the moment we arrive back. His bandmates remain utterly unbothered; and within minutes, he returns and apologises: "I've got a lot of other things on my mind, you know."

 

I think he's got deadline fever: he wants to finish, so interviews are distractions he could do without. But still, being on the wrong side of a Martin mood is a disconcerting experience.

 

In the evening, we go for a meal: the band, plus Michael Brauer; Estelle (Coldplay's manager); Chris (the press officer); Dan (A&R); Champion's wife, Mariana; a friend of Guy's who does lighting for Kasabian and me. Nowhere fancy, just a SoHo Thai joint. It's a laugh: Berryman tells rubbish gags which crack Martin up, even the old "Waiter, this chicken's rubbery" "Thank you" Chinese meal joke. Martin laughs and laughs at that one; unbelievably, he's never heard it before. He leaves early: he and Paltrow and Apple are staying round the corner. Jonny Buckland's on a mission, as are Dan, press officer Chris and me: everyone else disappears and we carry on drinking into the early hours. We talk about music (not Coldplay's) and famous people we fancy. Buckland has a think. "I like," he pronounces, "that girl in the X-Men. The blue one."

 

11 MARCH 2005. AFTERNOON. LONDON. In a rehearsal studio in deepest South London, a group of 40 people stand around awkwardly. They are DJs, journalists, fans, interested parties: Coldplay are playing live as a warm-up for their impending tour.

 

Some banter, some chat, and then they're on. Chris Martin teases: "You're all friends of Coldplay, part of the same scene: Coldplay plc". Amazingly, the new songs - Square One, White Shadows, Speed Of Sound, A Message and What If - already sound fuller, more satisfying than the old. Oasis would kill for What If. Dressed in black, with coloured tape on his fingers, Martin hunches over his piano in familiar can-I-eat-the-keys manner; Buckland's body language is louche and physical; Champion throws himself into his drums; Berryman is cool and pretty - "When did he turn into Joe Fiennes?" wonders the journalist next to me.

 

After each song, there's applause, even whooping: compliments indeed from an industry crowd. Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe is here and beside himself: "It's so great that they're back! We've missed them!" The noise that Coldplay makes soars up, through the roof, slices through the mashed-potato sky above. Summer feels closer. You think, bring on the festivals: Coldplay are headlining Glastonbury on the Saturday night. Afterwards, Martin says: "Glastonbury's going to be messy. It always is."

In part two of our exclusive Coldplay interview, Chris Martin and The Other Three rant about their imitators, their riches, and their running battles with the paparazzi.

 

In one corner, a baby grand piano last tuned in preparation for the VE Day celebrations. In another, a cinema-sized flat-screen TV hot-wired to a teetering tower of up-to-the-second entertainment. Everywhere, there's enough fruit and flowers to stage a Kylie gig. Transport Coldplay's Universal Ampitheatre dressing room to, say, East Finchley, and you'd expect it to be housing a family of 12.

 

Pay for the full tour and eventually you'll reach a secluded back lounge complete with bulb-framed, my-public-awaits dressing mirrors, where Guy Berryman, Will Champion and Jonny Buckland have gathered to wait for news of Chris Martins urgent visit to a throat specialist this morning. This, if you believe popular internet rumour, will be Chris'n'Gwynnie's room. Do they ever cordon it off so none of you plebs can get in?

 

"No!" Will yelps. "Never! We all have our girlfriends and wives on tour (Guy married his childhood sweetheart at Claridges last year "as every good Londoner should', Will has been married since 2003 and Jonny is currenty 'courting long-term), and the same degree of respect is offered to everyone. If someone wants some time alone..."

 

Put the same rumour to Chris in a people carrier ferrying him from soundcheck to his mother-in-law's Santa Monica house (Chris'mother-in-law, incidentally, is sexy-at-50-odd Meet The Parents star Blythe Danner) however, and he launches into a doctor's orders-defying rant. "What's the point in even answering...no, it's true. I insist on going everywhere in a fucking cotton wool-encrusted carriage drawn by horses. And I won't talk to any of the band. Even onstage you can't see it, but I'm surrounded by a perspex screen." He sighs heavily. "Fucking cunts. People just start this stuff, y'know."

 

He's understandably edgy on the subject: as a man always uncomfortable in the media spotlight, Chris Martin has been scorched by the paparazzi flashbulb. The sell, after all, was a delicious one: unassuming, oddball rock posho in whirlwind romance with A-list Hollywood beauty and famed Oscar-sobber Gwynnie Paltrow ("Oh don't call her that. Man! I hate people who abbreviate her name like that!") followed by marriage and oddly-named offspring (daughter Apple,bten months) inside two years. It's a coupling so fascinating because it's so unlikely. Hence the pap pack has been camped out behind Chris' wheelie bins since 2002, a topic about which Chris is deceptively blasé.

 

"Everyone has something to deal with." he reasons. "You get fungus in your bath, you just deal with it."

 

How do you deal with it?

 

"By buying as many hooded tops as I possibly can and pretending it doesn't exist. And never ever reading magazines."

 

Dodge the gossip pages all you like, but there's still an inner Liam bursting to get out of even the mildest-mannered paparazzi prey. Hence, in August 2003, Chris was arrested for malicious damage after attacking a photographer's car in Byron Bay, Australia, smashing the windscreen and - rather schoolboyishly - letting down the tyres.

 

Chris bites his lip. "Some of the stuff that comes out is nonsense," he says, "I've never actually hit anybody, nor would I, for the reason that if you even so much as scratch one of them (the paparazzi), they run off and tell the police. But when somebody jumps out at you and surprises you, your natural reaction as an animal is to protect, so that's all it is. It's made me so cynical and sad about anyone I don't know trying to talk to me."

 

To what degree do you live a Hollywood lifestyle?

 

"I would say zero. You'll have seen no pictures of me on any red carpets because I dont do it and neither does my lady," Chris insists. "She's just a person. A Grammy just sits there. An Oscar just sits there. It's just a fucking hunk of junk."

 

There's no false-beard-and-shades shenanigans for The Other Ones, meanwhile. They may be three quarters of the biggest Britrock phenomenon of the day, yet these are men who could walk down Oxford Street wearing a sandwich board reading, "Look At Me! I'm in Coldplay!" and still go unrecognised.

 

"People don't know who the fuck the rest of us are," Will admits, proudly.

 

"We don't merit an opinion," Guy adds.

 

A shame, because the accepted perception of Coldplay sits awkwardly with these shadowy backroom figures. Guy, for example, is Coldplay's swarthy dark horse with a touch of the diva (he so despises US television that he insists that all hotels remove the TV from his room before he arrives) and a craving for life-threatening narcotics (he smokes).

 

Jonny is the quiet, sharp-witted genius and social animal who drinks like a moderately well-balanced fish. And Will is well, Will's the drummer and that's about as far as we get.

 

"Because we step back, Chris' point of view is, therefore, our point of view," says Will. "We've been happy to let it be the Chris Martin Band."

 

Don't you ever feel like going onstage on stilts wearing your granny's frock and a KFC bucket, saying, "That wanker out of Snow Patrol, I hope he catches bird flu and dies, him," and becoming instantly famous beyond your wildest dreams?

 

Jonny: "There's no incentive to suddenly become famous for being an arsehole. Anyway, air rage is the only way it's going to happen."

 

Guy: "Supermarket rage- Trolley rage."

 

So Guy, Will and Jonny have the best of both worlds: relative tabloid anonymity and - more unusually than you'd think - an equal split of 'A Rush Of Blood...''s monumental royalties. So how much are each of you worth? A million? Two? Ten?

 

Guy: "The Sunday Times rated us as the fifth-richest people in Britain under 30."

 

Jonny: "Four million quid, I read I had!"

 

Will: "I wish I was me!"

 

How wrong were they?

 

Will: "It was a woeful under-estimate."

 

Coldplay: "HUR-HUR-HUR!"

 

Have any of you bought a solid gold dog yet?

 

Jonny laughs. "Oh, we all got them."

 

"Money gives you the freedom to travel," says Chris. "And it's very addictive and an incredible privilege. But I don't think it's just about'making it'. I think it's about competing with 'Sgt Pepper's, y'know? It doesn't matter how famous or rich the band that tries to do that is. That's why I admire that Johnny guy from Razorlight. He's going for the best."

 

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Coldplay's miraculously swift ascent to the top table of international rock music is that after only two albums they are The Establishment, which - to the Alan McGees of this world - reads The Enemy. They have, it seems, single-handedly divided the nation. While the likes of Snow Patrol and Athlete water down Coldplay's chiming bombast in the hope of photocopying their way to success, it could be argued that the raw rattle of The Libertines and Razorlight et al is a direct reaction to the stadium semi-indie of 'In My Place'and 'Yellow'.

 

"I think that's great," Chris argues. "I'd worry if there wasn't The Libertines and Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand and all that different stuff. I'm not sure when the transition happened between us sounding like everyone and everyone sounding like us. Why don't those people sound like Radiohead? Why don't we sound like Radiohead any more?"

 

And so, as the interview meanders off to take in the Jacko trial ("He's very weird but pretty innocent"), Fair Trade, the tsunami and guerrilla gigs ("Cliff Richard did the first guerrilla gig at Wimbledon when he said, 'Let's do the show right here!'"), we leave Coldplay in a traditional state of turmoil: a band troubled by self-doubt, success and the global injustices around them, yet about to release 12 more tunes that will mean the world to people. After which, as Chris suggested last week, they might pack it all in for a less stressful life in gangsta rap.

 

"I wouldn't want to stop working with him, but we'll see," says Jonny. "I think there is a lifespan of bands. I don't even know that I'd want to be doing it in 20 years. But then again, in ten years' time when I've got a massive tax bill and the fat and balding reunion tour is offered..."

 

The following weekend The Sunday Times places the four members of Coldplay equal fourth in their Richest Britons Under 30 list for 2005, estimating their fortunes at around ten million each. Hold off the reunion tour - it's solid gold dogs all round...

:stunned: :stunned: :stunned:

 

"Buckland has a hangover." :lol:

:lol: :lol: :lol:

why does it say Mr. Clarkson, don't get it..maybe they used metaphore?

Jeremy Clarkson does a tv show about cars in the UK. It's VERY boring... unless you're mad about cars... :snore: :snore: :snore:

:o

:o

so he really does have ferrari..that's so weird...

 

and they weight each 10 milion... :snore:

it's solid gold dogs all round

no no no! its meant to be gold goats----GOLD GOATS!!!!

"Guy, for example, is Coldplay's swarthy dark horse with a touch of the diva (he so despises US television that he insists that all hotels remove the TV from his room before he arrives)" and a craving for life-threatening narcotics (he smokes).

 

How are american and european tv any differnet? :lol:

"Guy, for example, is Coldplay's swarthy dark horse with a touch of the diva (he so despises US television that he insists that all hotels remove the TV from his room before he arrives)" and a craving for life-threatening narcotics (he smokes).

 

How are american and european tv any differnet? :lol:

Oh, there are a lot of differences...