Cold comfort

From their beginnings as introspective 'studenty' whiners, Coldplay are now the biggest band on the planet. We take a sneak preview of their long-awaited third album and uncover the story behind their unlikely success

Simon Garfield
Sunday May 22, 2005
The Observer

The biggest band in the world is sometimes called Coldplay, and sometimes The Fir Trees. The Fir Trees is the name attached to early CDs of the new Coldplay album, so that if they are stolen from cars owned by Parlophone employees or left on public transport by careless journalists, the new owners will not think they have stumbled upon the Holy Grail.
Until they read the back of the accompanying insert. This states that the CD will not play in any computer. If people do find a way of making copies or getting the tracks uploaded on the internet, each track will bear a print of the original owner's name, and prosecution will ensue for breach of intellectual property. The CD, which is called Album, rather than the real title X&Y, is not removable from the plastic sleeve without first breaking a seal across the top, and the seal has the sort of instructions that only used to appear on dangerous medicines: 'If this sticker has been broken when received please contact the person who sent it to you immediately.'

Unfortunately, Parlophone would not send me a copy of Album. Recorded postal delivery was not an option, nor was a hand delivery by bike. The CD had to be handed over by a record company employee in person, and at the same time I would have to sign a letter agreeing that I wouldn't share the contents with anyone. Having agreed to this, an email followed a couple of days later. 'Dear Simon,' it began. 'In the next few days you will receive a watermarked CDR copy of Album by The Fir Trees for advance listening...' There followed even more instructions about acceptance of terms.

Which leaves anyone who eventually agrees to these conditions, and banishes the dog and children from the room while listening lest they be liable for deportation to Tasmania, rather disappointed that the album is not by The Fir Trees at all, but by an earnest four-piece led by a man whose most enduring contribution to the arts may turn out to be his observations that many relationships are problematic and many things are yellow.

The first time I heard the third Coldplay album, which remains in captivity until 6 June unless someone unauthorised breaks a sticker, it was played at great volume in the office of Dan Keeling, the man who took a chance on the band in 1998. Keeling, not quite 30, is a tall, handsome man with a big jaw and a little beard, and he works in a good-sized office with a view over Brook Green in west London.

This space contains a large desk, a powerful hi-fi, a full rack of vinyl records and CDs, and a poster of the sleeve of the Led Zeppelin album Physical Graffiti. There is also a photo of Chris Martin with big Harpo hair, which is probably how he looked when Keeling first came into contact with him, in the days when he thought he wouldn't go far.

Keeling began work at Parlophone in the late Nineties as a junior A&R manager. He had come from A&M Records where he was a scout, running round the country seeing a couple of unsigned bands every night in the hope that he would spot the next U2. At most of these gigs, all he saw were mediocre bands, friends of the mediocre band, and other A&R scouts. 'We all swapped information,' he told me, 'because you didn't want to miss out. When people start talking about one name it gets passed around.'

Not long after he joined Parlophone one name being passed around was Coldplay, a group of students in their final year at University College, London. Keeling obtained a two-track demo tape, which included a song called 'Ode To Deodorant.' 'It was pretty mediocre really,' he remembers. 'Sounded like a lot of other bands - nothing that made it special.' He played the tape at one A&R meeting, and the others in the room were equally dubious. Keeling went to see Coldplay at a new talent night at Cairo Jack's in Soho. 'It was about 11 o'clock, and there were about 20 or 30 people there, mostly their friends. I stood at the back. Chris was bubbling away with the charisma that he's got, but they were a university band just trying to get it together.' Keeling left without getting a contact for their manager. 'I didn't even plan to keep an eye on them.'

A few months later, the band pressed up their own EP and a friend of Keeling's suggested he should listen again. The improvement was vast. 'When you sign artists you have to make judgments on the development,' Keeling says. 'You don't want a band who just have two singles on their tape but can't change creatively. With Coldplay I thought: "Fucking hell - there's got to be something there." The only guide I have to what might be successful is whether I want to listen to it myself, and I was playing that EP as soon as I got up in the morning.'

Keeling then began hanging out with them, suggesting they might feel at home represented by the label of other successful guitar bands such as Blur, Radiohead and The Beatles (he may not have mentioned that Parlophone was also in the process of signing Kylie Minogue). He signed them to what he calls an average deal - an advance big enough to support them while recording the first album, Parachutes, with built-in options to release further albums for the rest of their career. The competition wasn't that fierce. 'Everyone knew about them, but it wasn't like there were 10 offers going in. I think it was the tail-end of Britpop, and some people just thought: "Yeah, whatever." Some dismissed them as being a Radiohead clone, and there was that Alan McGee quote [McGee signed Oasis] about them being bedwetters. People thought they weren't going to set the world alight, but obviously they've developed into something better than that.'

I talked to one A&R man who didn't sign them. 'They were good,' he said, 'but so fucking studenty. I've never met a band so keen to do well in their exams.'

The band didn't have 'Yellow' or 'Trouble' when they signed. Parlophone released two EPs before the hits came. Keeling says he was expecting to sell perhaps 100,000 copies of Parachutes, not the 5 million it achieved. 'I think people may have felt a sort of ownership of the band, it connected with their lives. The lyrics are very personal, emotional, kind of filmic in a way. They're very ambiguous, but they say a lot while being very ambiguous.'

It is certainly arguable that until he married Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin could quite reasonably pass as everyman; he sounded confused about his life, his hair wasn't particularly nice, he distrusted Starbucks but wore logo trainers. He sat at a piano and sang plaintive songs which cloaked their banality with intense sincerity.

After stardom he sounded just as insecure, and it made people feel good to hear he was still emotionally adrift, even with - perhaps especially with - a gorgeous, intelligent film star to mother his children. At the record company, Dan Keeling was heading for promotion. 'To have the success at that level with my first band was a massive rush,' he concedes. I wondered how people reacted to him when Parachutes wouldn't stop selling. 'They probably thought I was a bit of a jammy bastard.' Some people were happy for him, he thinks, and others were just jealous, particularly other A&Rs.

Coldplay's second album, A Rush Of Blood To The Head, was less of a wide-eyed assemblage. The title described the way the band liked to work - a slow gestation in which the band wrote prolifically but diddled with the sound until release schedules were scotched and shareholders fretted, followed by a final intense push to make something great.

Dan Keeling said his role was to serve as an adviser. 'It's saying: "Maybe this song is better than that song," or "You've written this song before, but you could do something else like this."' He remembers Chris Martin playing the title track down the phone, and hearing the single 'Clocks' for the first time in the studio. 'That was everything you'd ever want in the job,' he says. 'Lyrically a great tragedy, you're lost and the lights go out and you're travelling through the track, and at the end you're wanting to come home. Just great, you know?'

The songs 'Warning Sign' and 'The Scientist' he quantifies as timeless themes freshly wrought: "My life is fucked without you, I miss you." You can sing that in 10 different and cheesy ways, but the way he sings it he makes it tie in with your life.' The second album has sold nearly 10 million.

The new record emerged from a process both prolonged and tortuous, this time involving a mid-stream switch of producers. The biggest challenge was to make something that sounded the same but different. Many of the tracks begin gently, rage in the middle, and end up small again, in the way pretentious pomp-rock bands used to do before they were ridiculed.

X&Y is not a ridiculous record, although it has grand aural ambitions. The songs combine bombastic blowouts with quieter spiritual explorations, and even the slower whiny tracks won't let the listener go without a big emotional shaking. There are several references to things being broken and things that may get fixed. Basically it's your rich superstars trying to be normal, something U2 toyed with for an album or two, but then decided it was hopeless and went back to wearing the big shades again.

Clearly, many of the songs on X&Y were built for huge live thrashings; Saturday night at Glastonbury this year will be a wonderful communal thing. Miles Leonard, Parlophone's managing director, told me he hoped it was a landmark record capable of reaching out to a mainstream audience and saying something to each of them - and his shareholders share the vision. (His exact phrase was: 'I absolutely believe they have made a classic album for ever more.')

Since Coldplay, Dan Keeling has signed Athlete and emerging bands Clor and Morning Runner, and has learnt one thing above others - you can't judge a band from where they are when you first hear them. He describes a meeting he had with Franz Ferdinand. 'We felt they were good, but for whatever reason - maybe just a bad meeting - we didn't know they were to have the kind of appeal they had. But you should sign music you think is great and try not to second-guess what people want. Once you start doing that you can become a little bit lost.'

Who else apart from Franz Ferdinand? 'There's a few. You can't get it right every time. In fact, most of the time you get it pretty wrong. But just trying to get a few that do OK is all you need.'

Following in Coldplay's wake

Starsailor
One of the first to follow Coldplay with their 2002 debut, Love is Here, selling a million copies. Although criticised by music journalists, they have been tipped to follow Coldplay's success in America.

Embrace
They met when Coldplay supported an Embrace gig in 2000. Things went downhill for Embrace when they were dropped by their label. Chris Martin came to the rescue by lending them his song 'Gravity' last year, which gave the band a new lease of life.

Keane
Memorably called 'more sheet-soilers than bedwetters' by the Darkness, Keane made it big with 2004's Hopes and Fears, which was the second biggest selling CD in the UK. The album was nominated for the Mercury music prize and went gold in the US.

Snow Patrol
Although they've been together for over 10 years, Snow Patrol have recently been influenced by Chris Martin's band and only found fame in the post-Coldplay landscape with their third album Final Straw last year.

Athlete
Signed to Coldplay's label, Parlophone, Athlete sold more than a quarter of a million copies of their debut album, Vehicles and Animals and their second album went to number one. One critic described them as 'slowing down in the middle of the road to park between Coldplay and Snow Patrol'.

· X&Y is released on Parlophone on 6 June. Additional reporting by Jenny Clover

last time i checked "the biggest band on the planet" was a title currently had by this irish foursome:



and by the looks of the success of their recent cd and tour, they aren't about to give that title up!