Back in Grey

Wednesday. A photo shoot. Coldplay’s lanky singer, Chris Martin, arrives at the East London studio thrilled to discover that he and his band—bassist Guy Berryman, drummer Will Champion and guitarist Jonny Buckland—are wearing perfectly matching black trousers and white sneakers. Nobody has asked them to; that’s just how they turned out.

This is a good omen. “I think it’s very important to come back with a slightly thinner singer and all of us wearing black trousers,” Martin announces.He is certainly thinner. It could be the Ashtanga yoga; it could be the sleepless nights with baby Apple. He denies the latter. “My baby sleeps. She’s basically perfect,” he grins.

Or it could just be stress. Coldplay have a history of making things difficult for themselves, of last-minute scrapping of tracks, of nail-biting delays. But it has never been as bad as this time. When their third album, X&Y, is finally released on June 6, it will be nearly three years since they put out the multimillion-selling A Rush of Blood to the Head.

X&Y has been almost 18 months in the making. During the process, they parted from their longtime collaborator Ken Nelson, who produced their first two hit albums, junked almost a year’s worth of recordings and pushed back the release of their album so many times that they were singled out as the main reason an estimated $615 million was wiped off of the value of British record giant EMI’s shares this spring. The company issued a profits warning in February after it became clear that X&Y wasn’t going to be released in the first quarter.

“That’s pretty rock & roll, you know?” says Martin. “I think that’s what actual rock & roll must mean. Because we’re doing what we believe in and not what’s good for the shareholders.”

In a week spent in the company of Chris Martin and Coldplay, that’s about the only flash of bravado Blender sees. For a beloved rock star with a glamorous, Oscar-winning wife and a bouncing newborn, Chris Martin is a mass of jitters. It could just be the familiar Chris Martin cycle of pre-release insecurity. Martin isn’t so sure. “I don’t remember being insecure on the last album or the one before,” he says wryly, “but everyone assures me that I was.”

Either way, after months of prevarication, here they are. In the next few days the album will be officially announced. Martin is antsy with excitement; with his index finger he smears letters on the glass behind which the band are being photographed: “Coldplay #3.”

You start with the best intentions of writing a story that’s equally about all four members of Coldplay—because they really are a four-piece band. Inevitably, though, you find yourself drawn mostly to Chris Martin. His charisma doesn’t just lie in the beauty of his voice, or of the plangent happy-sad songs he writes, or his long-limbed, long-faced good looks. It’s not even his boundless and infectious enthusiasm; being greeted by his wide smile as he leaps to shake your hand is a bit like receiving a welcome from a huge and bumptious Irish Wolfhound. Being with Chris Martin is like watching an unsteady trapeze act. He’s a man riddled with paranoias and insecurities that threaten to bring him down at any second, yet he’s simultaneously the most soaringly self-confident, self-possessed star you could imagine.

Coldplay share a vision; they’d be the first to admit that none of them are great instrumentalists, but they are all committed to making Coldplay this generation’s U2, to becoming a classic quartet whose finely honed sound rings and chimes like the most anthemic stadium rock. Often, as drummer Will Champion puts it, it’s what they don’t play that makes a Coldplay song. “I can’t do all that riddly diddly stuff,” he explains. “I’m not good enough. It’s all about not playing. I think I’m the best non-playing drummer in the world. No one not-plays like me.”

But it’s clearly Martin’s overarching plan, driven by his hyperactive mix of perfectionism and anxiety, that makes the Coldplay machine run. Martin clearly loves the attention, too; recently, though, it hasn’t been the sort of attention he likes.

The only dark moment at the photo shoot comes when he spots bassist Guy Berryman leafing through a copy of the British tabloid The Mirror that someone has left on the couch. “Don’t read that,” he insists. “It’s evil.”

Reluctantly, Berryman folds the paper and puts it down. Last week, The Mirror led with a front-page article: “Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s fairytale marriage is in deep trouble, say friends,” it reads. “Rock star Chris, 27, has had problems with his band Coldplay’s overdue third album—while Oscar-winning Gwyneth has been left home alone with their eight-month-old daughter Apple.”

When Coldplay released their last album, Chris Martin was just another handsome rock star. His marriage to Paltrow and the birth of their daughter changed that. Now Martin is more famous than the band he’s in.

The worst thing is that people close to him start to believe the fictions. His father rings him up, concerned about what he’s read in the papers. “Dad!” Chris explodes. “Why didn’t you just ask me?” Invariably, says Martin, the story is pure “bollocks.”

Martin is the product of that peculiar British institution, the boarding school; Sherborne School is an ancient Gothic pile built of honey-colored stone. It’s an old-fashioned English world in which boys learn rugby and cricket. In chapel they pass the names of old boys—carved in stone&mdasah;who died defending Britain’s empire. It was a place where Chris Martin prospered; at night he would sneak out of the dormitory and break into the music school to practice.

But his schoolboy self is shocked at a world in which people don’t play by rules he recognizes. He’ll offer a paparazzo a photo on condition they stop bugging him and Gwyneth; they take it and five minutes later they’re still following him. “Knobs,” he says. “This is a thing I’ve never encountered before in my life. And there is nothing I can do about it. I can’t hit a photographer. I just can’t. And,” he adds emphatically, “I never have.” (Last year, Martin was accused of kicking a photographer who had tried to take shots of him with Paltrow; the year before, he was charged with causing malicious damage by smashing an Australian photographer’s windshield. The charges were dropped.)

Martin blames this phenomenon on the fact that a) the real news is so sad you can’t be expected to think about it during your coffee break, and b) we don’t live in villages anymore, so we can’t gossip about the butcher’s wife.

So you have become the global village’s butcher’s wife?

“Well, the butcher’s husband,” he grins.

Today is the butcher’s husband’s birthday; Chris Martin is 28.

Paltrow is in the States, working. Martin gathers many of his oldest friends around him. His friend Simon Pegg comes; in Britain, Pegg is a well-known actor and comic—Martin and guitarist Jonny Buckland cameo-ed in Pegg’s 2004 movie, Shaun of the Dead. Pegg is a Star Wars fanatic. The two like to battle with lightsabers.

“Sometimes,” says Martin, “it’s good not to overthink. Sometimes it’s good to have swordfights with Britain’s leading comedian.” As a gift tonight, he gives Pegg a Darth Vader helmet.

During the evening, his friend Danny McNamara from the band Embrace calls to wish him a happy birthday. Last year Martin gave McNamara a song he’d written, “Gravity”; it became a Top Ten hit in the U.K. for the band. McNamara is onstage in Cambridge singing the song when he makes the call. Three thousand people in a concert hall sing Martin “Happy Birthday” on his cellphone.

His old friend James is at the celebration too; he’s known Martin since he was 7. Martin is happy to be with James again, but he’s also feeling sad because he knows that the band are about to start touring and he won’t see him again for ages.

This is typical. Chris Martin lives at the extremes of mood. Cockiness and self-doubt. Happiness and anxiety. Emotion X and emotion Y. “It’s something to do with the tension of opposites,” he tries to explain. “Anything that makes me incredibly happy also makes me sad.”

Thursday. Early in the morning Martin wakes. He’s thinking. He reaches for the cellphone and writes a text-message memo to himself. He’ll pick it up later in the day.

In the last three months of making an album, he doesn’t sleep much anyway. For him the night is a huge other world when he can lie awake and think. He closes his eyes and sees lists. I need to take the lyrics from that verse and move them … Jonny needs to wear these trousers …Martin writes lists obsessively. He scribbles ideas on the back of his hand, on scraps of paper, on his piano, on his computer. The other day he had to take his computer back to the store; the staff looked at him strangely. His computer was covered in writing.

For months he’s been writing track listings for the new CD, rearranging the order, eliminating one track, reinstating another. He grades the songs on a scale of one to 10. For a while, a seven-out-of-10 may be on the list, but eventually it’ll be elbowed aside by another song.

The X&Y sessions began their prolonged life in Chicago in late 2003; Jonny Buckland and Martin retreated there after the last world tour to write. Martin knew he was about to become a father and that the birth of a daughter would be a distraction. He wanted to get a head start.“And then my daughter was born,” says Martin. “I was still working, but I was distracted …”

Naturally.

“… And happily so.”

The band worked on the songs in London, Liverpool and New York. But by summer they were floundering. “It became a day job,” says Champion. “We would come in at 10 and go home at seven. It was good for our social lives but it wasn’t particularly fruitful.”

As ever, Martin’s perfectionism seeped through to the other members as paranoia. Was any of this any good? Is it all shit? “Are we objective enough to know what is shit and what isn’t?” Buckland mulls. “Well, I’m not objective enough to tell you whether I’m objective enough to tell you.”

With the album’s original release date just a few months away, the band regrouped, junked most of the tracks and started again.

Was it luxurious, not being a pop star for 16 months?

“No,” Martin says, smiling at his own contrariness over a breakfast of sausage and beans. “It felt quite depressing. I was enjoying being a pop star.”You enjoy having the sheet of paper under the hotel room door telling you what you’re going to be doing for the day?

“Yeah, I really do.”

When he came off a long world tour in 2003, Martin spent a little time visiting a therapist to help him come back down to earth. He says it’s like doing an interview, except you can let out all the fucked-up stuff. It means, he says, that you don’t moan so much to your friends.

In the summer, with the recording process at a low ebb, Martin found he was missing performing so much that he started renting karaoke machines at $450 a go. He’s had a long love affair with karaoke. As a 19-year-old student at University College London, he’d fulfilled his longtime ambition by forming a band, but he was unnerved by becoming a frontman. On holiday in Tunisia with a school friend named Phil Harvey—who was later to become Coldplay’s manager—Martin entered a karaoke competition on each night of the vacation. And every night he won the bottle of champagne (useless to him, as he doesn’t drink). He returned to the U.K. buoyed, ready to come to grips with his new role.

After a year of not playing live, Martin turned to karaoke again to remind himself what it’s like to be a singer. “’Cause I was missing that thing,” he says. “I’m the worst karaoke singer of all time—which is why we write our own music.”

Which songs do you sing?

“Often I try Otis Redding. It’s a great chance when you’ve got a private karaoke machine to try and sing like a black guy, you know? Because if you try it on record—”

But you did try it on record. You and Bono did Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” for the charity Artists Against AIDS Worldwide.

“We did.” Pause. “I think you’ll find the term is butchered.”

In August, perhaps anxious that his position as first among equals was creating divisions within Coldplay, Martin poured out his frustrations to the band in a bar. He bitched about how he hated his new life as an A-list celeb and the lies that were written about him.

“When Apple was born, there was a time when I felt very resentful of the rest of the band,” he admits. “I felt that they didn’t understand—not because there is anything to understand. But the thing about babies is, you can only understand if you have one.”

His mates sympathized. Gradually the tracks started to come together, but still frustratingly slowly. The 2004 deadline had already passed; they set another for the spring of this year. By Christmas they thought they’d finished, but then—typically—Martin had another crisis of confidence. He played the album to what he describes as “a couple of friends.”

Was one of them Gwyneth?

He smiles and, ducking the question, says that one of them was Danny McNamara. He’s like that about Paltrow: He tries his hardest not to mention her name in interviews. The less he can have their names linked in the press, the better. He manages to sidestep a question about whether the love song “Moses”—an unrecorded live track—or the magnificently soppy “What If” were inspired by Gwyneth by abruptly changing the subject to the sausage and beans on the plate before him.

Anyway, it’s McNamara, rather than Paltrow, whom he blames for the next crisis of confidence. The Embrace singer told him, “Sounds like there’s a song missing.”

“No there isn’t, you bastard,” replied Martin.

But the moment it was said, Martin started thinking Danny was right. By then he was so close to it that there could be 10 songs missing, for all he knew. It was a terrifying feeling.

He mulled it over in his waking night hours, the way he does. Look, you haven’t got anything simple and chord-y that you just want to sing along to.

Right, you bastard, he told the voice in his head. He got out of bed, picked up his guitar and at 3 a.m. wrote a song called “A Message.”

“And it was amazing,” he says.

For someone with buckets of self-confidence, you can be easily destroyed.

“Yeah. I can be destroyed by anything.”

Friday. in the afternoon, Coldplay play an impromptu secret gig in front of about 40 friends at their loft rehearsal space. Martin has described it to Blender as an attempt to make themselves nervous by playing unheard material in front of a small audience. If that’s the case, it works.Martin’s father, in crisp blue blazer, stands strait-laced among the tiny crowd. His dad taught him a crucial lesson that early on separated Coldplay from the rest of Britain’s often bitchy music scene: “He always says you won’t get anywhere by slagging other people off.” Chris is unashamedly rock’s Mr. Nice Guy.

Martin starts by thanking everyone for coming. Including his dad: “Thank you for getting it on with my mum.”

Then he launches into “Square One.” It’s a magnificent, sprawling song—in three parts—about Martin’s fear of returning to Square One, and the crucial importance of making sure that never happens.

The band is full of energy. Martin crouches at the piano, intense, bent almost double, in a pose oddly reminiscent of brooding pianist Schroeder from the Peanuts cartoons. But as they continue through the set, the vitality evaporates; despite having set himself the challenge of playing this impromptu small gig, he’s disappointed the crowd doesn’t seem more into it. Rather than see that it’s hard for a sparse 40 people to wig out in the middle of a London afternoon, it’s as if he’s starting to wonder again about whether any of it is good enough.

Martin believes anyone making an album should read Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. It is, after all, the story of how a man took 85 days to catch a single fish. “It’s about someone struggling for ages to capture this amazing thing,” says Martin. “And when he catches the marlin and gets it back to the shore, people pull it apart.”

Right now he’s reading Into the Heart—The Stories Behind Every U2 Song. U2—who were one of the blueprints for Coldplay—are on their 11th album; Coldplay are still beginners.

“But U2 can be beaten!” declares Martin bullishly. “For me it’s no different from the film Rocky. You study your opponent. And I regard them as opponents.”

They’d be flattered.

“They should be terrified,” retorts Martin with a half-smile. But he means it. If you don’t aim to take on the best, he’ll say, what’s the point? “Why settle for being the ninth-best band ever?”

So where do you rank yourself now?

“Ever? Um, I think we’re probably fourth.” Pause. “Only joking.”

One week later. Backstage at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. Coldplay is here to play their first large-scale show in 18 months, as a benefit for public radio station KCRW.

Martin has not put in an appearance yet; he’s been staying with Paltrow in Santa Monica. When he arrives, he looks tired. He’s got a sore throat.By the time he bounds onstage for the soundcheck, the rest of the band have already been playing for half an hour. “You don’t have any singing on backing tracks, do you?” he asks the soundman. It’s only half in jest.

The middle of the day is taken up filming a segment for MTV. They get in a van to take them to the Universal Sheraton, a few hundred yards away. MTV has chosen Coldplay to launch a new show called MTV 5 Star, in which MTV gets to premiere an album. The band has agreed to record a live segment to plug the show.

The concept for the segment is that the band will be playing acoustically in a hotel room. Gamely they set up and launch into an acoustic version of what they’ve finally decided is X&Y’s lead single, “Speed of Sound,” with Champion on bongos, Berryman and Buckland on acoustic guitars, and Martin on percussion.

Instantly, it’s beautiful. Martin’s cracking, infected throat has a fragile, reaching beauty to it. The strange, unfathomable song bursts into life. Watching the monitor, the MTV producer’s face lights up. The crew is buzzing. The band are weary, but grinning too.

Everyone’s happy—except for Coldplay’s manager, Estelle. She has just calculated that this clip of them playing their next single will air days before the single goes to radio—thus giving MTV an exclusive that is owed to America’s radio stations. This will mean trouble.

There isn’t time to record another song, and nobody wants to. This performance is too perfect to lose. Estelle is on the phone, desperately trying to OK the clip with EMI.

Martin is suddenly bullish. “Whose fucking band is it?” he demands. “It’s ours. EMI don’t own us.” Pause. “Well … They own 75% of us … but …”

And everybody’s laughing.