COLDPLAY SET TO PAINT TOWN
BAND HITS CALGARY WITH TOUR OF GRAFFITI-INSPIRED DISC MYLO XYLOTO
“We’ll start glowing in the dark,” Chris Martin sings on Coldplay’s Charlie Brown, one of 14 uplifting, arena-filling songs from the band’s fifth poprock album, Mylo Xyloto.
Glow-in-the-dark graffiti, circular spider webs of lights, a secondary Xshaped stage and beat-up, painted instruments are all part of the British band’s corresponding tour, which kicks off its North American leg Tuesday night in Edmonton, of all places, before coming to Calgary Wednesday.
Some cleanliness freaks and anti-graffiti politicians might not approve, but the power of street art is one of the inspirations behind Mylo Xyloto, a concept album about a girl trying to find love in an apocalyptic world.
“Everywhere we go — we just came from South Africa — there’s graffiti all over the place,” Martin says in a video interview with director/photographer Anton Corbijn.
“If you start looking for street art, it’s all over the place and you realize it’s sort of the voice of not the voiceless, but people expressing themselves often on quite ugly surfaces and turning them into beautiful coloured murals. So I think we just really loved the freedom of expression, we just responded to the idea that the you can paint anything yourself, you don’t have to be a grandmaster. Graffiti has its critics, but often it changes something that’s really drab and oppressive into something else.
“That’s the idea of the record, too,” he says. “Trying to find colour within darkness and depression and all the terrible things in the world, trying to find the light. That’s what I think a lot of graffiti does, put some light into darkness.”
Alas, Coldplay seems to be giving journalists the cold shoulder these days — so we relied on quotes from some of their pals to shed some light on Martin and his mates:
Paris
Contrary to his name, Paris is a graffiti artist from Hull, England, and he’s responsible for painting the band’s instruments and stage sets. He also coloured some dilapidated buildings in the video for Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall and much of the art on the cover (and in the liner notes) of Mylo Xyloto — with help from Martin, bassist Guy Berryman, guitarist Jonny Buckland and drummer Will Champion. For a gallery of photos, visit paris1974.com/coldplay.
“There was a good 20 pages of reference that I looked at initially,” Paris says in an interview on coldplay.com.
Rik Simpson
He’s one of three producers who worked on Mylo Xyloto. (Markus Dravs, who worked on Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs and legendary sound collagist Brian Eno are the others.) Simpson also worked on two of Coldplay’s previous (and better) albums — 2008’s adventurous Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends and 2002’s single-heavy A Rush of Blood to the Head.
“I think the band is always pushing themselves to evolve,” he tells uaudio.com.
“They never want to stay in one place too long because they have too many ideas floating around. On this record, they’ve definitely moved on from (Viva La Vida). There are more modern electronic influences, but it still retains a very bandlike feel. I think that what they’re really attracted by is using new technology to make music that really hasn’t been made or heard before, but playing it as a band. It’s not a lone artist or producer in a studio coming up with sounds. Everything is a performance based on the chemistry of four people playing in a room together.”
roadie #42
Coldplay’s mysterious roadie often provides the best insight into the foursome’s studio sessions and tour rehearsals, courtesy of his blog on the band’s website.
From Feb. 11, 2011: “It’s a strange thing to witness, when the band are working with Brian (Eno). Just his presence affects the way that they play. And even more than that, it affects the way that the band listen. For starters, the volume goes way down, which you would expect to take all of the excitement out of things. It very definitely has the opposite effect, though. Suddenly, every tiny sound, every nuance in the timing of the notes becomes audible and begins to burst with possibilities. It’s a little as though he encourages everyone’s antennae to open higher and wider.”
Anton Corbijn
The renowned Dutch photographer and director (Control, The American) not only shot a webcast of Coldplay’s 2011 concert in Madrid, but he also directed the video to the title track from Coldplay’s Viva La Vida.
The song was inspired by Depeche Mode’s kingclimbs-a-mountain video for Enjoy the Silence — shot by Corbijn in 1989. “Chris wrote the lyrics because of seeing that (Depeche Mode) video and then he asked me, in a way, to make a complement video . . .” Corbijn told a crowd at the Venice International Short Film Festival in 2008. “So we did the video in The Hague, in Holland, where the Queen lives, and I got the same outfit as we did for (Depeche Mode frontman) Dave Gahan. And we had Chris Martin walking through The Hague.”