Stadium-show stars ready for Rogers Place
Coldplay’s Chris Martin on success, death and being a ‘modern-day Shakespeare’
Over the last 17 years, Coldplay has solidified itself as one of rock’s biggest touring acts.
“I think we’re well rehearsed,” Martin says down the line en route from Chicago to Cleveland as the band’s A Head Full of Dreams trek, which hits Edmonton and Vancouver this month, winds its way across North America.
“We left it a long time before coming to Canada for this tour and I’m happy that we did because now we know what we’re doing as it comes through Toronto and everywhere else.”
The tour — Coldplay’s seventh large-scale trek — finds the British pop-rockers settling into their role as one of music’s biggest acts, performing stadium shows in Canada for the first time in eight years. This comes after Coldplay played its largest show, last year’s Super Bowl 50 halftime.
Q A Head Full of Dreams and your new EP Kaleidoscope are full of anthemic songs. How did you find your way back to that big, stadium sound after 2014’s Ghost Stories?
A I think that one of the things we learned by looking at artists like Bruce Springsteen is that it’s OK sometimes to go smaller and more intimate, and then somehow when you return to the bigger sound it feels fresh again. I think that’s what we’ve started to do; do things that people don’t expect us to do.
Q You guys first started to break big 17 years ago. Did you ever imagine this kind of success for Coldplay?
A No, and I think one of the reasons why we’re really loving this tour so much is that we’re really grateful for everything. We’re still the same band, and we’re able to remember the shows when there was no one there. We can remember that grind ... When we first came to Toronto, we were just excited to be there. But when I look back all I can think is, ‘Wow, I never thought we’d ever get to this place.’
Q Jay-Z recently called you a “modern-day Shakespeare,” what did you think about that?
A Man, I don’t know how to answer that. First of all, he’s my friend and he’s an absolute genius. I’m always going on about how great he is and he
just dropped in that beautiful Christmas present of a compliment.
Q What albums have you been inspired by this year?
A Of course, you can’t deny popular music right now, with Drake and Bruno (Mars). There are newer artists, too, like Izzy Bizu (who is opening for the band). I’m also getting an incredible amount of enjoyment from Chopin and I’m going through a Paul Simon obsession.
Q A Head Full of Dreams has led to your biggest tour. Is it your favourite Coldplay record?
A I don’t have one. I think that some of them are more cohesive than others in terms of their structure and stuff, but each of them have songs that we still play. And none of them would have existed without the one before it.
Q U2 is out playing songs on their Joshua Tree Tour that they’ve never performed before. Is there a Coldplay song you guys won’t play live?
A There are a few from 2005 that we don’t play very often ... Really, we’re suckers for singalongs, so we tend to play ones that we know the crowd is going to join in on.
Q Recently, the music world has lost a lot of greats. Has that made you take stock of your own mortality?
A Of course. Chester (Bennington), Chris (Cornell), the great David Bowie, Leonard Cohen ... it’s a lot of people. I personally try to be grateful for every day because you never know when it’s going to be done. That’s the way that we’ve been approaching our work and every show. We want to really give it up and do our best because you just don’t know. When people you grew up thinking were superheroes pass on to the next phase, it reminds you, you’ve got to grab life while you can because it’s finite.
Q You set the internet on fire when you suggested that Coldplay might be done after this record. What does the future hold?
A Really what I said was that this album and the EP (A Head Full of Dreams and Kaleidoscope), and this tour marked the end of a chapter. It’s our seventh album and it’s the end of that first stage of the band. I think what the future holds is us doing things slightly differently and trying to create music in ways that is graceful and honest. But we’re still just trying to figure it all out — the next phase, and what that will be.
Q What’s your motto?
A It’s very simple: treat others like you want to be treated. That’s it.
Q If you were stuck on a desert island, what albums and movies would you bring with you?
A I would take the Bob Marley best-of Legend. I would take the Waltzes by Chopin, and I would probably bring Graceland by Paul Simon. For movies, I would take the Roberto Benigni film Life is Beautiful, Back to the Future and Mary Poppins.