My Coldplay.com

Coldplay

They’re putting the audience to sleep.

Shit, if they knew they were going to have this impact, why didn’t they play
a ballad? But no, MTV wants the HIT! But, they could have changed the song
at the last minute, without the suits knowing. Oh, no, that’s Elvis Costello
on SNL, the guys in Coldplay don’t have those kinds of balls. They play along.

Meanwhile, can you explain the outfits to me?

Please, please, please, all you people flooding my inbox telling me Coldplay
is godhead, defend this performance. They look positively goofy, and appear
to have about as much staying power as Haircut 100, A Flock Of Seagulls and the
other British acts of the early eighties.

http://lefsetz.com/

[thumb:27266:l]Germain Amphitheatre, Columbus, Ohio 8/29/05

For most bands, getting bodies through the door for a show can be a problem. Coldplay was no exception last Wednesday night, but not for lack of fans—for lack of traffic cops. Some concertgoers were stuck in traffic for over two hours as they approached Columbus’s Germain Amphitheater, due to a combination of construction and understaffing that led to insufferable bottlenecking. Still, the venue was packed when openers Rilo Kiley hit the stage. The band turned in a well-received but short set, and as night fell, the crowd settled in, anxiously awaiting the main event.

Coldplay arrived to a thunderous cacophony of cheers, launching the set with “Politik,” followed by “Yellow.” There was an exceptional cohesiveness to the music—the clean, crisp packaging of each song, delivered on Chris Martin’s soaring, at times mournful falsetto. Jon Buckland’s sure-handed slide guitar provided the distinctive atmospheric backbone while the wide-screens and light show enhanced the experience without overshadowing the music’s simplicity.

Mid-set, Martin and his bandmates broke down for several acoustic numbers, cantering passionately through Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and their tribute to the Man in Black, X&Y’s “’Til Kingdom Come.”

After an energetic performance, the band returned for a “Swallowed in the Sea” encore, the show’s virtuosic highlight—a lush, gorgeous slow build of a song. Last was “Fix You,” a benediction from the church of Coldplay, a service that had seen Chris Martin everywhere from the upper decks of the pavilion amongst his apostles to contorted backward over his piano bench. The breathtaking finale climbed and climbed until Martin stumbled over a lyric in the song’s last line. But Martin chuckled over his blunder, which came at the show’s apex. By that point, it didn’t matter much—the scores were tallied, the votes were in, and Coldplay had won just about every heart in the place. And it seemed like no one minded the traffic much on the way out.

PasteMagazine

Coldplay’s ongoing Twisted Logic tour is doing huge business as the box office in North America, but the U.K. group already has its sight set on the future. Following the Dec. 20 close of a European tour, Coldplay will return to North America in February for an arena tour that will run through mid-April, the group’s manager, Dave Holmes, tells Billboard.
[Read more]

The Coldplay story is a story about ambition, about four people who formed a band not to become famous or provide fresh soundtracks for TV ads, but because they wanted to write great songs, to make music with real honesty and passion.

“We were trying to say that there is an alternative,” said singer Chris Martin, “that you can try to be catchy without being slick, poppy without being pop and you can be uplifting without being pompous.

“Because we’re sometimes playing quieter stuff, it’s hard to sound like we’re trying to change things, but we wanted to be a reaction against soulless rubbish.”

Coldplay met in the mid-’90s during their first week as students at University College London and quickly became friends. Martin began writing songs with Jon Buckland. Guy Berryman liked what he heard and joined in on bass. Will Champion was so keen to be part of it that he moved from guitar to drums.

All four shared a passion for music and a quiet determination to be as good as they possibly could be. They rehearsed almost every night.

“We used to play in bathrooms, the basement, even in the park,” Martin said, “Anywhere we could find to play.”

They recorded a four-track EP and pressed 500 copies, which got them a gig at the In The City music festival in Manchester in 1998. Their set brought them to the attention of Simon Williams, who signed them to his Fierce Panda label for one single, “Brothers And Sisters,” which in turn led to their deal with Parlophone.

Coldplay’s debut album, “Parachutes,” has sold nearly 5 million copies worldwide, winning a clutch of NME and Q awards, two Brits in 2001 and the Grammy award for Best Alternative Album in 2002. Almost overnight, the band moved from playing small pubs to T In The Park in Glasgow, The Big Day Out in Australia and a headlining U.S. tour.

“It was nerve-wracking, quite surreal,” Buckland said. “But also the biggest high ever.”

how to go

THE NAME: Coldplay

THE LOCATION: Riverbend Music Center, 6295 Kellogg Ave., Cincinnati

THE HOURS: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

THE TAB: $68.25 and $48.25

THE PHONE: (513) 562-4949; www.riverbend-music.com

AJC.com

I finally got to watch the ‘Fix You’ video debut - after struggling with both the Coldplayer and MTV.com. I had no sound on one and no picture on the other…. grrrrrr I finally downloaded it from Channel4.com

I must say, it’s very good…

[Read more]

IN CONCERT

WHEN, WHERE: Saturday at the PNC Bank Arts Center, Holmdel

INFO: (732) 335-8698

ALSO: Sept. 6-7 at New York’s Madison Square Garden

Chris Martin wears a broad smile as he bounds into the private dining room of a tony beachfront hotel in Santa Monica, Calif. The glassed alcove, off-limits to the paparazzi that tend to shadow him since he wed actress Gwyneth Paltrow in 2003, offers generous views of the sand and surf below.

The blue-eyed, 6-foot-2 singer marvels at the posh and spacious digs, perhaps forgetting his stature in the music ranks these days. Martin is the affable, self-effacing frontman for British band Coldplay, the logical lads-in-waiting for U2’s broad and global audience.

On the rise since 2000 debut “Parachutes,” which sold 2.3 million copies largely on the strength of hits “Yellow” and “Trouble,” Coldplay broke big with 2002’s “A Rush of Blood to the Head.” It yielded hit single “Clocks” and sold 3.7 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Coldplay’s third album, “X&Y,” released in June, helped push Coldplay to stratospheric heights.

But customer satisfaction, not record sales, is what concerns Coldplay.

“Record sales don’t really mean anything,” said Martin, 28. “For us, the pressure is imagining some 15-year-old kid in Cincinnati who buys our album and doesn’t feel like he wasted his pocket money.”

That kid held up the album’s release. Last summer, Martin, guitarist Jonny Buckland, drummer Will Champion and bassist Guy Berryman had finished “X&Y” when they decided to go back to point A. The 15 songs they had completed were deemed lacking, and the band retreated to a cramped rehearsal room for an overhaul, the same drill they applied to “A Rush.”

“We always think, “We’ll just hand in the album, they’ll say it’s brilliant and we’ll all be happy.’ Then the time comes to play the songs to close friends and people we trust at the label,” Martin said. “We hear it in a whole new light and we want to pull it back. We did the opposite of polishing it up.”

New songs were penned and existing ones sharpened or discarded.

“We keep the organic ones and throw away the genetically engineered ones, even though some of them taste great,” Martin said.

Gorgeous, aching, neurotic and luminous, the ballad-driven “X&Y” resembles earlier Coldplay, though a stronger pulse courses through its beguiling melodies, and tougher guitar textures counterbalance Martin’s emotional falsetto and fragile piano lines.

First single “Speed of Sound” bowed at No. 8 in the Billboard Hot 100. The band’s current tour has yielded sold-out shows at venues including Madison Square Garden in New York and the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel.

“They’re a thinking person’s rock band,” said Sean Ross of Edison Media Research in Somerville.

APP.com

I finally got to watch the ‘Fix You’ video debut - after struggling with both the Coldplayer and MTV.com. I had no sound on one and no picture on the other…. grrrrrr I finally downloaded it from Channel4.com

I must say, it’s very good…

[Read more]