Nice and poppy

Coldplay break the American ice

by Gary Susman

On America's radio, it's 1963 again. There's plenty of immaculately produced teen pop, but rock and roll is as good as dead. As it turns out, there are plenty of great rock bands in England, but they can't get arrested over here. Suddenly, there appears a clean-cut foursome who play oddly uplifting music, a quartet that, given a well-orchestrated marketing blitz from Capitol Records, has the best hope of any band from the UK to make rock matter again to listeners on these shores.

In February 1964, that was the Beatles. In February 2001, it's Coldplay. The band came out of nowhere last year to become the biggest thing in England since sliced kidney pie, selling out stadiums and becoming finalists for the Mercury Music Prize (the British Grammy). Their debut album, Parachutes (Capitol/Nettwerk), was released over here in November and quickly elbowed its way onto many critics' Top 10 lists. The album's soaring single, "Yellow," was soon the soundtrack to all the ABC network's prime-time promos. As Parachutes shoots up Billboard's "Heatseekers" chart, Coldplay are currently swinging through a brief tour of the US, including a stop in Boston this weekend (It shows how hot the band are that their announced Paradise show sold out, and was quickly moved to the 1500-capacity Avalon, where it also sold out.)

It's a promising start, but Coldplay face an uphill battle against the overwhelming American indifference to British rock. The huge success of the Beatles' compilation 1 only underscores how long it's been since the Beatles and the two decades' worth of British Invasion bands that followed made waves in America. Even in the '80s, it took little more than a quaint accent, a novel haircut, and a guitar (or synth) to make it here. But by the '90s, hip-hop and homegrown alternative rock ruled the radio. Listeners here couldn't be bothered to discover British rock, despite all the attention that headline-grabbing UK superstars like Oasis and Blur got at home and everywhere else in the world. Even Radiohead, whose 2000 album Kid A (Capitol) managed to debut here on top of the Billboard charts and was widely praised by critics as the Most Important Rock Album of the Millennium, couldn't maintain its momentum in a Total Request Live-defined music scene that was infinitely more interested in Jennifer Lopez's ass.

Coldplay are often compared to Radiohead (or at least the pre-Kid A, guitar-friendly Radiohead) for the lyrical falsetto of singer Chris Martin, the versatility of guitarist Jonny Buckland, and the band's propensity for chiming, Bic-waving anthems like "Yellow." Coldplay have also earned a place among the "nice guy" English rockers (in contrast to the loutish "lad" bands like Oasis), including Travis, Doves, and Badly Drawn Boy -- none of which have made much of a dent in America either. Coldplay's songs, though mostly slow in tempo and woven through with a strain of wistful British melancholy that can be traced back as far as the Kinks, are generally rousing and upbeat and won't shock your auntie with their lyrics.

Of course, being thought nice can be a career liability in rock. (Martin is famous in England for eschewing drink and drugs and for having a sex life only slightly more interesting than Britney Spears's.) Here you have four guys, all 22 and 23, who met five years ago at London's University College, started a band together two years later, and, despite some tension in the studio during the painstaking Parachutes sessions, are still gee-whiz about their skyrocketing success.

"It's been great so far," says drummer Will Champion, phoning during a break before last week's show in Portland, Oregon. "The shows have been sold out. It's been amazing. People have been singing along to all the songs, not just `Yellow.' We've been stopped outside venues and asked for autographs. It's been incredible."

Coldplay disdain the labels used to pigeonhole them, especially the "nice guy" tag. "It is nice for us to come to a place where it's only the music people have heard, rather than all the nonsense that is the English press, where you get slagged off for being too nice," Champion says. He's referring to coverage that irked the band last year, when Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records and a key player in Oasis's rise, dismissed Coldplay as "music for bedwetters." Says Champion, "That thing didn't really make a difference to anyone. It was really pointless. It was just a thing for him to get publicity for his new record company."

As for whether there really is a "nice guy" wave of English bands, Champion says, "I don't know. We don't know about any other bands. We just do what we do. What you see is what you get, I guess."

In fact, the members of Coldplay can be as disarmingly guileless in conversation as they are in their music. Asked the origin of the group's name, Champion says, "It doesn't mean too much, to be honest. We got it off a friend because they had a band that went through about four names every week. They discarded it, and we said, `Can we have it?' They said yes. That's about as far as it goes."

In trying to understand Coldplay's immense appeal, critics have grasped at all kinds of comparisons, not just to Radiohead and Travis, but to acts as far-flung as Jeff Buckley (for Martin's vocal range and virtuosity), the Smiths (for Martin and Buckland's Morrissey/Marr-like interplay of voice and guitar), the English "shoegazer" bands of the early '90s (you can tell Buckland is a My Bloody Valentine fan from the drone effect on "Yellow"), and even Dave Matthews (for the band's clean acoustic palette, especially on songs like "Parachutes," and for the timbre of Martin's voice).

Champion bristles at such comparisons. Of Coldplay's music, he says, "How do we describe it? We don't at all. That's why we play it rather than talk about it. It's difficult. That's why we're not public speakers. We're musicians."

One reason these songs work so well as stadium-ready sing-alongs is the universality of their lyrics; though they often have to do with the claustrophobia of the musicians' growing fame and insular friendship (two songs, "Trouble" and "High Speed," speak of living "inside a bubble," while in "We Never Change," the singer yearns to escape to "a wooden house" with his friends), they're general enough to be about all kinds of human bonds. "A lot of the album has to do with everyday problems," says Champion. "It doesn't really matter who you are. It's not necessarily about us. It can be applied to a lot of people's situations. But those songs particularly are about being in the middle of everything and trying to get away from it. A lot of the things are about relationships, and not necessarily with a partner. It could be about friends or parents.

"We can't write anything other than what we know. That would just be wrong. We can't write about growing up in the ghetto. It has to be something you experienced for it to have any conviction. Honesty is important to us. But we write about things that are quite everyday, so a lot of people have experienced the same things."

As a result, Coldplay have the potential to break through to more than just the cult audiences that other current English bands have mustered in America. Asked who's been coming to their US gigs, Champion says, "It's anyone, really. People don't have to be a particular kind of person to like our music. We had people come down to the gig yesterday [in Seattle] who looked like they should have been at a Limp Bizkit concert. It's not one particular type of demographic. We get people over 40, parents."

Champion knows it will take "a lot of hard work, a lot of meeting people" to break Coldplay in America, but it's hard work that has brought the band to the top in just three years. "We wrote songs for a year and a half before we got signed. It's not a hugely long time, but it's not like we got lucky. We knew we wouldn't get a second chance to make a first album. We realized we were in a great position to do something really amazing, and we didn't want to waste it. There's been a lot of stress in the studio and a lot of heavy touring schedules. We've put a heck of a lot of work in to get where we are."

Helping to expand the American fan base is a thorough Internet campaign involving multiple Web sites, including the band's own sleekly designed coldplay.com and Capitol's hollywoodandvine.com, where listeners can stream Parachutes in its entirety. Even Napster has been good to Coldplay, Champion says: "I've met a few people who've said they heard our album on Napster, and now they're going to go buy it."

Thanks to the ABC campaign, "Yellow" is ubiquitous, though that may be a mixed blessing, Champion says. "If it had been a hundred percent up to us, we would have said no. It's out of our control, I guess. We don't want our songs to be on everything. When there's no merit for us, when it's being used to sell someone else's product, then I don't think it's a good idea at all. It's something we'll become increasingly aware of, that we'll put a stop to."

A song as huge as "Yellow" can also become a millstone, though Champion says, "It hasn't really got ridiculous yet. It's become quite a big song, but we're not scared by it yet. The test comes with the second album, to prove that you're not a one-hit wonder."

At least Coldplay aren't sick of playing it yet. "We wrote it, and we like the song. There are thousands of people out there who've maybe heard the song but haven't seen us play. That's one of the things that keep us going, even though it may be our fiftieth show in a row."