Will Champion talks about tour rehearsals and EMI (plus new Bern photos)

Will Champion sat down with Swiss website tagesanzeiger.ch before the show at Bern's Stade de Suisse on Wednesday and talked about the rehearsals before a big tour and the relationship to his band's multi record label EMI. Here is the online interview. Thanks to Larry for the translation.

"Bund: Do you have diligently practiced before your big tour or is a band like Coldplay not in the need of doing that anymore?

Will Champion: We find out how a song should sound in order to let it work live, but we don’t spend months with rehearsals before a tour. This happens before we go into the studio. During this time, we rehearse the songs, discarding ideas and work meticulously on details. The same thing happens again when we are in the studio working with producers.

For the last album one of these producers was Brian Eno, a man who has already helped bands such as U2 and David Bowie to fame and honour. Please describe a normal day in the studio.

In the morning we often began with a musical exercise program. We should play what just came to our mind, without being focused on a goal - which at times degenerated into almost free jazz. In the afternoon we worked focused on individual songs, but when we got stuck, Brian Eno broke the thing off quickly, immediately moved to the next song. He doesn’t like it when things go round in circles.

I've heard that you also dealed with magic cards.

Yes. When we didn’t know what to do, he came up with these cards that we had to draw. In a random process pattern of thoughts and routines should be broken.Then on the cards were things like "play it backwards," or "allow a simplification of structures”. Sometimes this has actually brought us to do things that we hadn’t done in our normal operating procedures.

Why does a band like Coldplay need a producer at all?

Otherwise it would take an eternity for us to record an album. A producer can give an idea a form, he keeps track of things and distance.

Is there a boss at Coldplay?

We have found a way to function as a band. Chris Martin writes all the songs, but when he submits us with ideas that wouldn’t leave some leeway for the band or where not everyone of us can stand behind, we have to reach a consensus on it.

The record company EMI seems to be plenty depending on Coldplay – if an album delays the stock market values will break in. How do you deal with such a relationship?

It shouldn’t simply worry us. And it ultimately doesn’t change our attitude to music. We don’t write a better album, because we want to help EMI, as we would never make a bad album to annoy EMI. We are still in the fortunate position that we can publish our music with the help of a larger group.As long as this works so well, there is no reason to be worried about it.

There’s a little problem with Coldplay for quite some time: One listen to your songs, possibly in love with them, and when you see the band live later on, one must share this love with 20,000 others. Has Coldplay accepted being a stadium band?

If I love a song or a band, I never think that I'd like to have it for myself. Far from it! I want to inspire as many people as possible for it. Music deals with that finally: It connects people. And obviously we are padded in a general sense of being with our music. I don’t have any problems with it. We have started as a musician with this ambition, and so we want to continue. I've read several times: "This song sounds as if it had been written for a stadium." This is ridiculous. Nobody does it deliberately. If a song doesn’t sound good when you play it alone in a small room at the piano, then it won’t sound good in a stadium either. It needs that intimacy in a song in order that it becomes something big. One can mix up everything in the studio with guitars, reverb and electronics. But when a song doesn’t have a soul and emotion in its core, it will never sound great. Coldplay has always focused on this core.

New pictures of Coldplay at Stade de Suisse, Bern, Switzerland (2nd September 2009):