From left: Coldplay performing at the 2006 Grammys; as fresh-faced megastars-in-training in 2000

Scruffy, round-faced, and thoughtful in a way that savors challenge (on the last tour, Buckland says, after reading The Brothers Karamazov, “I thought I might turn Orthodox Christian”), he orders the first of two rounds of Guinness and tells the story of meeting Chris Martin during their first days at university. Buckland was in his dorm room with the door open, and Martin, “like a whirlwind, ran past with his long hair and said something like ‘So you play guitar!’ and ran off.” One day soon after, they decided to play together; and Buckland, at first poking fun at his younger self, says, “I remember telling our friend from school, ‘I met an amazing singer—we’re gonna form a band, and it’s gonna be great!’ After, like, the first time. Before we got on as people, we got on playing music. It was like a first date, speaking through guitars. Like you have an inbuilt feeling for what someone else is going to do. Empathy toward them.”

The anecdote describes one of several strokes of luck that brought the four together, and I wonder if their skill in navigating these breaks ha s something to do with the unusual stability of their upbringings. All four men’s parents are still married, and each has at least one parent who is, or has been, a teacher. Buckland, like _{Paltro w and Apple,} Martin and Champion, still lives within a few rocking out demurely miles of the first apartments they had as uni- ^{at Live 8, 2005} versity students. (Berryman commutes from the bucolic Cotswolds, west of London, in his black Aston Martin.) Even so, there’s nothing smarmy about their steadiness. Fatherhood, Champion later points out, means, “You have to plan your benders,” as Berryman chuckles his endorsement.

But don’t they ever have the urge to cut loose in hotel-room-trashing rock star tantrums? “Of course, but I always see that energy as, like, wind farms,” Martin says. “You’ve got to channel it to something more useful. There’s this glamorized ideal of arrested development in music, particularly with Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, and all the great fallen idols. There’s this one side of you, and one side of musical culture, which tells you that you’re not supposed to move on in your life at all. But if you look at the greatest

artists, like Dylan, that’s not true. The whole rock star myth, which is 40 years old and basically nonsense, has nothing to do with being a rock star. Everybody gets trashed and breaks things. By that standard, plumbers and heating engineers are just as rock’n’roll as rock stars. Rock’n’roll is, you’ve gotta follow your own beliefs; it’s all about freedom. And we’re really lucky, because we, to a certain extent, have that.”

Coldplay are using their freedom to try to plan their future—which includes their obsolescence. Phil Harvey, who says the group came perilously close to burning out while making Viva La Vida, intimates they have already mapped out their career endgame—none of them find the proposition of playing “Yellow” for the next 30 years attractive.

For now, though, there still seem to be endless decisions to make. Back at the Bakery, Martin grabs a macrobiotic smoothie from the fridge and sucks it down. He says, “I keep thinking about this Apple thing,” meaning the ad they’re going to shoot in New York, and he’s agitated. It’s bizarrely easy, at this moment, to forget that we are talking about a deal with the music industry’s Godzilla, one that could be worth millions, comparable to its ad campaigns with U2 and Bob Dylan. The way Chris Martin talks about “this Apple thing” sounds more like he’s hashing out a question that preoccupies anybody who wants to be a serious person and a big success: How can you be a good man, and top dog, both?

“This kind of thing is just what people do now. This is not something to worry about. This is just how things are. Isn’t it?” he asks himself, as outside dusk falls on the empty schoolyard framed by the Bakery’s picture window.

Habitual anxiety contributes to Martin’s chronic insomnia. “When things are good, I get too energized to sleep. When things are bad, I get too upset to sleep. The only easy sleep I get is on bland days, and I try not to let the days get bland,” he explains. Pulling out of it, he asks me about my love life, wondering how long my longest relationship ran (“But two years is like ten years in gay years, right?” he says), and eventually, we get to talking about female orgasms and whether they still happen after menopause. Somewhere I picked up the idea that they don’t, and, theatrically fretful, Martin runs downstairs to the studio to ask the technicians if that’s right. Nobody’s sure. “Google it,” he says to a guy in the production booth. “I don’t want to Google it,” the tech replies, bashful.

It’s bath time for the kids again, so Martin goes home, and I head off to dinner with friends. About an hour later, my phone vibrates with a text from Martin. He’s got news—women can have orgasms after menopause—and I laugh, realizing who probably answered the question for him, and hoping that tonight, with one less thing to worry about, the guy will get some rest.