Coldplay: Shine On

Photo by Takay

The four bandmates -- Martin, guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman, and drummer Will Champion -- met as undergraduates at London's University College in the late '90s, that pre-Cambrian age when human beings had to leave their houses to buy albums and new artists had to sign away their lives to corporate behemoths for a shot at stardom. Martin's status as old-school mass-media royalty was ratified by his 2003 wedding to Gwyneth Paltrow; and by 2005, the group's multigenerational audience had grown so broad, and their brand so valuable, that EMI, the parent company of their label, Capitol, had to amend its profit forecast when the release of X&Y was delayed. Where such reputations and fortunes are at stake, schadenfreude always licks her lips.

So it's easy to understand why, a few hours after Myrtle's pronouncement in the driveway, the 31-year-old Martin begins a merchandising meeting inside the Bakery with this question: "Is somebody making a T-shirt that says I HATE COLDPLAY? It would sell millions." (The idea, though funny, is not unprecedented; Amy Winehouse pulled the same trick on her tour last year.) Brainstorming, Martin puts some stick in the subversion: "And sell it outside the concert, across the street from the stadium or wherever, so it looks like a bootleg."

It's the first week of May, and the band members are seated around a big hardwood dining table on the Bakery's second floor, an open-plan loft with white walls and plank floors, beanbag chairs, a brown suede wraparound sofa, and racks of clothing they designed themselves to wear on their upcoming concert tour. They purchased the building two years ago, in part so they'd have a place to gather at times like this.

"The worst thing that could happen is people would buy it," says Berryman, 30, of the hypothetical shirt.

Mock piously, Martin adds, "Life is about bringing the positive out of the negative. Silver linings and all that."

Sometime after 2002's A Rush of Blood to the Head, Coldplay temporarily parted ways with their original manager, an affable, exquisitely well-mannered childhood friend of Martin's named Phil Harvey, so integral to the group that he's listed on albums as the band's fifth member. On X&Y, however, Martin says, Coldplay "turned over too many of the decisions to the wrong people," meaning, basically, the label. Now, with Harvey back, they're making all the decisions themselves, from the details of merchandising to designing the toy-crammed set for their concerts -- a trampoline, lights whizzing around the stage on tracks, inflatable video globes whose projections employ planetarium technology -- and, at the same time, trying to be good dads. (All four are fathers now; all but Buckland, who lives with his girlfriend, are married.)

"The problem with wanting to control everything," Buckland, 30, complains, half joking, "is that you have to control everything." The band work down the long to-do lists on dry-erase boards hanging in the Bakery's living room deliberately, and with a bit of frenzy, because there's no way of knowing how anyone could achieve the objective they've chosen. To wit: A big photo of the Beatles dominates the hallway leading to this room. "We're goin' for the big bomb," says Buckland. Just now hitting their prime, Coldplay openly covet the title of Biggest Rock Band in the World at a moment when the position seems in danger of being permanently downsized.

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