much more interested in rhythm and texture. And Chris being the songwriter he is, it was quite nice to marry those things.”

But the album’s ambition and experiments don’t limit its accessibility. While writing, Martin says, “I always think about some regular 16-year-old called Dave who’s on his bus trip to school: Is he going to want to listen to this? Last time we got so worried about who thinks this and who thinks that, and this time I’ve been really focused. On Dave. My 16-year-old imaginary friend. But not in any weird way.”

In some respects, Coldplay remain unapologetically conventional. When Martin mentions the recent choice by Muse and Nine Inch Nails to release tracks and let listeners remix them, he shudders: “It’s like letting somebody watch you in the bathroom.” But despite their atavism (there’s nary a BlackBerry among them; Martin has never seen the band’s MySpace page and says he’s only just discovered e-mail), they know that to maintain a market for their material product, they have to offer something new. They just don’t know what it is yet.

Contractually, Martin says Coldplay are obligated to EMI for “about 71 more albums” (“We’re in. We’re owned.”), so they can’t try anything as radical as Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want release of In Rainbows. The company also recently made drastic cuts to its A&R department and slashed the label’s overall workforce by a third. These changes follow EMI’s purchase last year by Terra Firma, a private equity group led by Guy Hands, who has no music industry experience and is now the company’s chairman.

Asked how Coldplay get on with Hands, Champion answers, “We don’t know him.” (Scanned as poetry, the line stresses we and know.)

Later, I ask Martin why he hasn’t met Hands, and he bristles: “Should I? It’s a bit like when the general manager comes around the grocery store where you work. I don’t know what we’d talk about.”

However, Hands, reached via e-mail, says he’s looking forward to meeting the band “as a fan, and have indeed arranged to do this very soon.” Of Coldplay’s importance to the label at this critical time, he concedes, “No album or band, however brilliant, can be responsible for a corporate turnaround. That was the old industry model.”

So, does Coldplay think Viva La Vida can save EMI?

“No, but it’ll probably save the world,” Martin deadpans. “I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t put an end to all violence and suffering.”

AFTER

rehearsing for a couple of hours in the studio—a ten-sided room that Champion and Berryman have neatly graffitied with VIVA LA VIDA! and THE KING IS DEAD and decorated with wall-size photos of forests, an Alp, and the Earth as seen from the Moon—the guys go upstairs for a conference call with Dave Holmes, another of their managers, in Los Angeles. Some of Holmes’ plans for launching the album stir, today, the kind of close-quartered frustration you might find in a submarine whose commander follows pre-sonar battle strategies.