The group recorded a few demos under the name Big Fat Noises, and if they’d kept that name, they would’ve never ended up in this column. Bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion joined up later. In his first week at UCL, Chris Martin met guitarist Jonny Buckland, and the two of them hatched plans to form a band. Martin went to boarding school and then majored in Ancient World Studies at University College London, which sounds like a fake name for a school but which is, in fact, the second-biggest college in the UK. In the UK, Leo Sayer’s “ When I Need You” was sitting at #1 that day.) Martin’s father ran a caravan dealership, and there are a few Tory politicians in the extended Martin family tree. (Eagles’ “ New Kid In Town” was the #1 song in America when Chris Martin was the new kid in town. Eventually, Chris Martin became something else, a playfully bashful ham who turned out to be way more Bono than Thom Yorke.Ĭhris Martin comes from the English city of Exeter. Initially, Coldplay stood out from their competitors because they had one crucial element: a singer who seemed willing to play the pop star, to take on the shy-dreamboat role that Thom Yorke had so forcefully rejected. This wasn’t especially fair to Coldplay, who had Radiohead’s knack for soothing falsetto wails but who seemed way more interested in chasing the ghost of Jeff Buckley. (Radiohead’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit, incidentally, is still “Creep,” which peaked at #34 in 1993.) Coldplay were right in the mix - or, at least, that was the perception. Those bands all went on vastly different career journeys, but at the beginning, they all seemed to want the same thing. Somebody else, surely, was going to come along and conquer festivals with majestically bummed-out introvert anthems, and many hopefuls were waiting in the wings: Travis, Keane, Snow Patrol, Muse, Elbow, Doves, Starsailor. Radiohead themselves had moved on from sweeping, dramatic, vulnerable sincerity, opting instead for glitchy abstraction. When Coldplay first came to mass consciousness, they were part of a wave of British bands who seemed to want very, very badly to become the next Radiohead.
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