REVIEWING

the current edit of the “Violet Hill” video, Martin declares a couple of scenes (one of himself gazing profoundly into the distance, another of the whole group walking, in self-important slo-mo) too “pretentious.” He uses that word a lot when criticizing the visual presentation of the band. Yet this is the same guy who, over a vegetarian breakfast at a little café in his neighborhood, addresses the album’s original nine-word, bilingual title, which can only be printed in full according to the band’s exacting specifications, with proper line breaks:

Viva La Vida or

Death and All His Friends

“I know it sounds pretentious, but I couldn’t give a flying fuck. That’s just what it’s called. You can call it Viva La Vida: snappy, easy. You can call it Death and All His Friends. Or you can call it the Coldplay album, or you can call it that piece of shit.”

Viva La Vida is the title of a Frida Kahlo painting that Martin saw at Kahlo’s house in Mexico last year. “What I really love about that painting, and her in general, is that her colors were always so bright and vibrant and alive, and yet if you look closely, she’s really aware of all the darkness.” Martin, whose mother is a devout Christian, and who grew up in a church that was preoccupied with heaven and hell, cannot abide dualisms, “all this talk about happiness and sadness and darkness and light. Both things always exist concurrently. I am a happy guy, but I’m also a very sad guy. It just happens to be at the same time.” (This is probably the place to note that Woody Allen is his hero.) He alludes to Kahlo’s tortured life—“And then she painted this fruit bowl one day, and wrote on it: Viva La Vida,” he says. “I just thought, Awesome”—and gives this look like he just caught a snowflake on his tongue.

Martin’s lanky innocence, when he’s relaxed, comes with a chaser of shrewd, dry wit. Asked what he’d say to people who call his activism on behalf of Make Trade Fair a standard-issue-pop-star God complex, he quips, “Well, I would say unto them…” Prodded, he adds, “I think this whole ‘God complex’ thing is people’s way of making themselves feel good about being lazy. It’s generally the people who don’t do anything that criticize. I’ve never said, ‘I just wanna save Africa, man.’ We’re talking about one specific thing that we’ve really researched.” He does not add, but it’s worth pointing out, that his interest in poor countries relates to his personal history: His mother grew up in Zimbabwe, his grandmother lives next door to that country’s president, Robert Mugabe, and one of Martin’s first summer jobs was working in a recording studio in Harare.

Martin, who splits his time between New York City and London, rarely mentions

his domestic life. Though his wife stars in what will turn out to be one of the summer’s biggest movies, Iron Man, which opens today, it doesn’t come up in conversation. When we drift close to the topic of being one-half of one of the most glamorous couples in the world, Martin shifts from mellow engagement to almost jumpy wariness.

For celebrities of his magnitude, that’s not unusual. Most are terrified to think about the destructive emotional bond that drives celebrity culture, in which stars and fans consent to believe the former are ontologically superior to the latter. Yet at one point, when Martin gets stressed out because our conversation strays to a dead end he can’t escape without discussing the effect of fame on his personal life, he does go off the record. “Please, don’t let this be a sabotage,” he says—and the combination of his willingness to trust and the substance of what he says makes it clear that he avoids talking about his life as a celebrity not because he thinks he’s special, but because he knows he’s not.

On the record, he does say, “Politicians must be so happy about how crazily over-the-top celebrity society is at the moment, because it means they can get away with murder. Literally, murder. Because everyone’s following around a 26-year-old girl and obsessing about her life instead of what’s really going on in the world.” We’ve all heard famous people say this kind of thing, pretty much always sounding glib or sententious. Martin’s tone is unexpectedly unsettling: soft, authoritative, furious, bleak.

WE WALK

from breakfast to the Bakery, pick up the rest of the guys, and head to the studio where they’re to film more stuff for the live show. On the way, we pass the ground-floor railroad flat that Berryman and Champion shared when they first formed the band. Its blue door, with a lion-head door-knocker, today, as ten years ago, is missing the knocker. They point out a new window that’s been added, mention a murder that took place at the Queen’s Head pub across the street, and laugh, remembering the four-foot-high shower—installed by the landlord’s four-foot-high handyman. They paid 100 pounds a week rent for the place; Martin and Buckland lived a couple of miles away in a flat that cost about half that.

Later, after production is finished for the day, Buckland walks me past Hampstead Heath to the pub where, before their second gig, they decided to call themselves Coldplay. (An allusion to a poetry book, Child’s Reflections, Cold Play, the name was handed down from a band that rejected it.) For their first gig, they’d been Starfish, but “thankfully, there were a lot of other bands called Starfish,” he wryly notes.

M y Favorite M artin FOR MANY OF TODAY’S HITMAKERS, COLDPLAY’S TH E THING

Though Viva La Vida’s world-music forays and Eno-fied production find Coldplay moving beyond the sonic signatures of their first three records, the band’s earlier work stands as some of the decade’s most influential, spawning a host of emotive, echo-friendly, piano-playing followers and shoving aside nü metal as the rock sound of the new millennium. “At the time Parachutes came out, radio was full of growling vocals and huge distorted guitar sounds,” says Cary Brothers, whose Coldplay-indebted “Blue Eyes” graced the Garden State soundtrack. “Coldplay made it okay to not play tough rock. They reopened the door for melody and emotion.”

And the bands spilled through: the Fray, Augustana, Lifehouse, and OneRepublic in the U.S.; Starsailor, Keane, Athlete, and Air Traffic in the U.K.; Pilot Speed in Canada; Kettcar in Germany; Dikta in Iceland. But as Sony producer and A&R exec Mike Flynn explains, the group changed the business just as much as they changed the music. “Before Coldplay, people at the label were saying kids only wanted singers who were running around like a young Eddie Vedder,” remembers Flynn, who signed the Fray and whose production brought a distinctly Coldplay-esque sheen to their and Augustana’s latest albums. “People didn’t think you could have a frontman like Chris Martin anymore, but he made it socially

Air Traffic

acceptable to sit at the piano, sing a great song, and still lead a band.”

But while humbly expansive melodies and sensitive falsettos continue to ring across the airwaves, those sounds don’t occur in a vacuum. As Brothers explains, Coldplay’s success might have as has much to do with the times as it does with the tones. “First came 9/11, and then came a war—people were waiting to get past mindless aggression,” he says. “Listeners want to use their hearts more, which is exactly where Coldplay’s music hits them.” But that’s not the only place. “When you release a make-out record as good as Parachutes,” Brothers says, laughing, “you’ve set yourself up for a pretty successful career.” DAVID MARCHESE