Coldplay Success-Coldplay Music
Chris Martin can make humility an act of hubris, and vice versa. He's as cocky and as insecure as rock stars come, a psychic balancing act reflected in his band Coldplay's crescendo/crash songs.
For instance, during a recent interview, the handsome singer says that the four hours he recently spent in a Miami studio with hip-hop producer Timbaland provided a bracing reality check -- even while he acknowledges his own superstar status.
"I gleaned that it doesn't matter if you're in one of the biggest bands in the world," Martin says on a mobile phone as his car makes its way out of New York City, en route to a show in Ohio --"it doesn't mean you're very good."
Then Martin concedes this is no revelation: "But I glean that most days."
Thanks to the nagging inescapability of their hummably sad songs -- and of course, to Martin's marriage to Hollywood A-lister Gwyneth Paltrow -- no band in recent years has pierced the celebrity stratosphere as quickly as Coldplay. When their label EMI announced earlier this year that the British group's album "X&Y" would not come out in the first quarter as originally planned, the public company's stock took a dive.
The quartet's June release was then greeted with the kind of fanfare few acts get for their third album. Ad nauseam, Coldplay (Martin, guitarist Jonny Buckland, drummer Will Champion, and bassist Guy Berryman) has been called "the next U2."
It's probably all been too much too fast, as Martin is the first to admit: "It's funny when you realize you've become one of those people that you always used to imagine lived on Mars."
Martin's success may be out of this world but, like so many blue-eyed British pop stars before him, he still kneels at the altar of black American music.
"It was the best fun I've ever had," Martin says of his short experience with Timbaland.
The studio time was the finale to an MTV Video Music Awards weekend Martin also says was "amazing."
The 28-year-old father of 1-year-old daughter Apple likens the VMAs to a school track meet.
"These things are incredibly funny because there's all these people there with all their crews. When you watch it on TV you feel like everyone must know each other-- it's all very glamorous. But the reality is... everyone knows who everyone else is, of course, but everyone's kind of wary of each other."
Martin says he didn't pay too much attention to the onstage and backstage conflicts between 50 Cent's G Unit and Fat Joe's Terror Squad, who insulted each other on the mikes then nearly got into a brawl behind the scenes. "I've been to a few awards show with 50 Cent," he says. "It's the same as with Oasis in London: You're glad they're there cause something might happen."
Besides, speaking two days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Martin has more important things on his mind. "The reason why I didn't really notice the beefs and all that is it seemed so irrelevant. There's these big things going on so close by. The arguments between a couple of people at awards shows, they pale in significance. Increasingly in our world we're focusing on the doings of celebrities to distract ourselves from the actual goings-on on the planet. Escapism is really dangerous."
This is the sort of BIG STATEMENT for which Coldplay is known, loved and mocked. Like U2, they are a band with causes, particularly fair trade. These are educated lads who met at college. Their 2000 debut, "Parachutes," was a haunting, hopeful, mournful lullaby emanating from the fallout of Radiohead's "OK Computer" apocalypse. It and '02's "A Rush of Blood to the Head" won Grammys for best alternative albums. And in '03, Martin married Paltrow.
Source-Kansas.com
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posted by Heel Yeah @ 3:11 PM
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