Coldplay - The Singles 1999-2006

Mega-sellers return to their vinyl roots

There’s been a fashion in recent years for bands to pass through a chasm of blandness. Coldplay, now begrudgingly regarded as a band on a par with REM or even U2 when it comes to sales, songwriting élan and general do-gooding, went through it about three years ago. They were practically the granddaddies of the anti-movement. Nowadays, it’s your Jameses Blunt and Morrison who get the flak from the cool set, but for a while Coldplay couldn’t seem to put a foot right.

This was odd. All the credentials were there: months of touring the smaller venues of the country? Check. Raggedy, vintage-clothing look, free of stylists? Check. Early, slightly mundane sub- Radiohead tracks? Definitely check. As if to vindicate all this, they now serve up what is essentially a best of, in the form of 14 7” singles, covering all they’ve released. It draws a history that’s almost cutely out of fashion in an age of MySpace fanbases and instant million-sellers. Here was a band that started on an indie label (Fierce Panda), got snapped up by the majors, developed a bit and then took on the world. The old-fashioned way, if you like.

To try to describe the music is pointless. Their omnipotence on radio playlists means that everyone in the Western world knows what the strains of The Scientist, Yellow, Clocks and Trouble sound like. But other snippets from their albums, such as the Jeff Buckley pastiche that was Shiver and the epic, yearning and quite fantastic In My Place, also more than warrant re-listening, especially when presented as they are here on the world’s greatest-ever format.

There are a few treats here for the hardcore fans and completists. The Brothers & Sisters EP, replete with an embryonic Coldplay sound that’s far too explicit in its influences, is here in full, while The Hardest Part shows up on wax for the first time (it was originally a download-only offering in the UK in 2006). There’s not even going to be a CD equivalent of this set, which will doubtless mildly irritate the billions of devotees who look to Starbucks for their musical signposts.

And then there are those simply massive tracks that have soundtracked weddings, funerals, stag nights and hen nights the country over for the last seven years. In this light Fix You, a track which jostles for place at the end of Sunday ITV dramas with the likes of Paul Weller and Radiohead, is actually good. There’s a certain level of embarrassment that accompanies making a statement like that, but the fact remains that it’s full of those goosebump moments; so full, in fact, that critics now accuse Coldplay of writing to a formula: a quiet start, a slow build then an enormous explosion of emotion near the close. Textbook. Yes, there does seem to be some sort of pattern to Coldplay’s chronology, but if you’re doing something right, why stop?

Parlophone | 3883247 (14-7”)

Reviewed by Jake Kennedy
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