How Coldplay Became Bigger, Happier, and More ‘Coldplay’ Than Ever

T
he night sky over New Zealand is wide and wondrous, inky and vast. It’s the type of sky that broadcasts Earth’s infinitesimal place in the infinite cosmos. The type of sky that fills one with awe at the beauty and mystery of existence. The type that brings to mind how, from some vantage point in some far-off pocket of space, human difference simply disappears and we all appear as one, floating in harmony on our beautiful blue and green marble. 

And so it is fitting that one night in mid-November, Chris Martin should find himself under such a sky, wandering around the docks of Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour in the hour approaching midnight, pondering creation at large and his place as a creator in it. It was not his first time visiting the water that day. A spiritual teacher once told him, “If you feel a bit down, go for a walk and just look up. And it lifts you” — advice he heeded then and has heeded since. Martin, a musician who is known to be mindful, tends to have a lot on his mind. 

“If you zoom out to about 10 miles above, you see, ‘Oh, there’s just tiny points of difference, but the human things that connect to you are pretty powerful,’ ” Martin says slowly, and in a calming tone, the sky arching above him. “And if you zoom back enough generations, everyone is your family ultimately, so you’re never not with your family, in a way. You’re never really alone.” 

For more than a quarter of a century, Martin has fronted Coldplay, which by some measures is this marble’s biggest band right now. Their Music of the Spheres tour, which started in March 2022 in Costa Rica — a location chosen because 99 percent of its electrical grid comes from renewable energy — has sold more than 12 million tickets and earned more than a billion dollars, making it, at present, the most-attended tour of all time and the highest-grossing rock tour of all time, with no definitive end date in sight. It has broken attendance records across the planet, in countries that include Argentina, Brazil, Chile, France, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, and Sweden. And it has reached these heights with monumental melodies and universal lyrics, sure, but also with something else: an all-encompassing, intergalactic worldview of unity, love, and acceptance. 

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Or so I’d been told, anyway. I had arrived as a potential acolyte the week before, flying out from America on the night of the presidential election and landing in Sydney in time to see three shows of the tour’s Australian leg. Wandering Accor Stadium as fans were filing in, I’d chatted with attendees wearing face glitter and euphoric expressions who shared that they were there not only for the music but also the “vibe.” 

Yet nothing could have prepared me for the lovefest that is attending a Coldplay show — each millisecond calibrated for maximum explosions of communal joy. There were confetti guns going off and balloons launched into the sky and a literal parade of beautiful, bobbing, inflated planets, the imaginary “spheres” that had supposedly provided their music for Coldplay’s past two albums (2021’s Music of the Spheres Vol. 1: From Earth With Love, and last year’s Music of the Spheres Vol. 2: Moon Music). There were LED bracelets lighting up to grand effect and hologram members of BTS joining Martin for a stirring rendition of “My Universe,” a 2021 collaboration with the South Korean band. There were puppet solos and a sample of Louis Armstrong talking about “what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance” and Martin’s imperative to raise our hands in the sky, twinkle our fingers, and “send some of this energy, some of this love, to Ukraine or America or Myanmar or anywhere there are peaceful people who need Australian love.” There were four separate fireworks displays. Four, I tell you.

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On the first night, during a bit when Martin reads audience members’ signs and then blows their minds by inviting someone up onstage to be serenaded, he’d sung “Magic” to a young couple who’d rescheduled their honeymoon to be there. On the second night, he’d performed “Everglow” to a couple whose sign said that their Benji had cancer and that Coldplay’s music was getting them through (“So Benji’s a dog?” Martin clarified when he saw the sign up close. “OK, I didn’t quite understand that. All right, well … we care about all beings, so let’s sing to Benji, your dog”). On the last night, before he brought onstage a mustachioed man in a purple unicorn onesie — and after he’d invited me into the group hug-huddle that he, drummer Will Champion, guitarist Jonny Buckland, and bassist Guy Berryman have below the stage before every show — he’d launched into “Yellow” with the announcement that “I play this for Alex.” I thought for sure that I’d misheard him until the record label rep made clear that I hadn’t: “I think he just dedicated that song to you!” 

By the show’s end, when we were instructed to put on our “moon goggles,” which turned pinpoints of light into glowing rainbow hearts, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my emotions were being manipulated. But honestly? I’m not nearly enough of a cynic to care. America might have just elected an authoritarian, the planet might be burning and drowning all at once, our species might be slowly extincting itself and all others, but in the stadium on those nights, all those concerns seemed possibly (probably?) fixable with the widespread application of Coldplay’s brand of love for all humankind (and beings!) and with Martin singing “Fix You” right there on the upright. 

SO, OK. THAT’S how I felt then. In the cold light of day, as I readied myself to meet Martin for our first official interview, doubts had begun to creep in as to a rock band’s role in planetary salvation. From afar, there’s certainly something of the guru or the ascetic about Martin, something highly therapized and slightly otherworldly. It isn’t just the fame, the celebrity marriage, the conscious uncoupling from said celebrity marriage, the clean eating, the teetotaling. It was the general, yes, vibe. Now that my senses were no longer being love bombed, I had to wonder: Was this guy for real?

Anyway, this is where my mind is two days after the band’s last show in Sydney, when Martin lumbers into a hotel suite with sweeping views of Auckland’s waterfront. He wears an open expression, earrings made from colored strings, and the same black sweater with pictures of the Earth, moon, and stars sewn on that he’d worn to the Grammys two years prior. He carries a bowl of round, brown, healthful concoctions and a glass jar full of watermelon juice, both of which he insists on sharing. He seems to hum with a sort of Zen energy, like a person coming off a fast. 

Almost immediately, he offers me my own affirmation: He wants me to feel free to write with abandon. “Anything that might be not cool — I don’t really mind. Do what you want,” he says from the crook of a sleek, L-shaped sofa. “I’ve spent a long time not needing anyone else’s approval. And that’s a daily practice.” He pauses and pulls his bare feet up beneath him. “I think if this [article] is to be useful, then perhaps part of it is about the confidence to become yourself and not to try and conform to old tropes of what you think might have made a good Rolling Stone act.” 

“WE ARE FOUR WHITE, MIDDLE-CLASS MEN FROM ENGLAND. WE DESERVE TO TAKE SOME SHIT.”

He sounds legit, of course, widening his eyes slightly as if to let in — or give off? — more light. And, truth be told, it is highly possible that Martin has jettisoned any pressure to fit a mold that was not precisely Martin-shaped. His band’s music has managed to sell more than 100 million albums and has won more than 300 awards, including seven Grammys. It has persevered and flourished through reviews (good and bad) and articles (nasty and nice) for longer than many of its fans have been alive. Indeed, it is safe to say that, at present, Coldplay are now more “Coldplay” than ever, and that, after 28 years, Martin has seen the utility in that, in letting Coldplay be precisely the only Coldplay they know how to be. “There’ve been times where we [were like], ‘Well, we should probably try and look a bit like this or talk a bit like that,’ ” Martin says. “And now, it’s just like, ‘No.’ Just follow whatever’s being sent. And that’s a very liberating place to be. If you want a puppet to sing a bit of a song, well, some people might not like this — my mum being one of them, for example. But my point is, that’s part of my journey to be like, ‘Well, I love you, and this is what we’re doing.’ ”

To be fair, this has meant doing some pretty kooky things of late, from Martin popping up to sing karaoke in Las Vegas dressed as an alter ego named Nigel Crisp to the band launching Moon Music — along with branded toasters and tea services — on QVC, creating 32 minutes of television so bizarre I had assumed it was a piece of performance art until Martin told me it wasn’t. “QVC was just fun and odd. It’s a weird thing to go out and sell an album. We just acknowledged that, yeah, we’re trying to sell something, but we really like the thing we’ve made.”

In fact, as the conversation goes on, it’s hard to find something Martin doesn’t like, or an issue he can’t reframe into a more positive, empathetic light. He treats Coldplay haters with profound generosity of spirit: “It would be terrible if we lived in a society where everyone had to [like the same thing]. We’re a very, very easy, safe target. We’re not going to bite back. We are four white, middle-class men from England. We deserve to take some shit for what our people have done. There’s a reason we get to play all around the world, and part of it is not necessarily very healthy.”

Even when I bring up the election, Martin finds an optimistic framing. “Of course, I have my own general leanings, which would probably be described as extremely Democratic,” he tells me. “But the elections and the news cycle make you think: Oh, there’s two different types of humans on Earth, and they hate each other, and it’s a disaster. You could look at it like that, that there’s this chasm between two groups of people. But I’m in a job where I don’t see anything except the opposite of that. Every day I go onstage, I don’t see a chasm at all, I only see collaboration. So my point is, how can we, as a band, be a force for helping people remember ‘Oh, we’re not actually at war with the rest of humanity’?”

By now, we’ve made our way outside of the hotel and are attempting unsuccessfully to get past locked gates and down to the harbor, trailed almost imperceptibly by Martin’s bodyguard. (“She played the baddie in Chinese kung fu movies and then set up a security company in Hong Kong, and now she comes on call with me sometimes. Isn’t that amazing?”) He says he’s rarely recognized when he’s just out walking around: “There are some idiosyncrasies about being famous, but I look like so many people that I can easily pretend not to be me.” When I point out that people might tend to notice the shoeless guy, even if they don’t know he’s famous, Martin shrugs: “I’m not always barefoot. I love shoes, and I also love not shoes. I’m not trying to disrespect the shoe community.” 

Finally, we find an open gate, and ignoring the “no trespassing” sign, Martin makes his way to the edge of a long dock. I remove my own shoes, and we dangle our feet down in the water, which is cool and bracing. Tiny silver fish flutter past our toes. Martin looks out toward the horizon and then closes his eyes and tips his face toward the afternoon sun. “This is very special. Thank you for this moment,” he says.

He seems for real. Very, very, very for real. About all of the Rolling Stone rock & roll tropes not taken. About Coldplay’s acceptance that theirs is a message of acceptance. But also, now, about how maybe that message is the one Martin himself most needs to hear. “When I’m saying these things about world peace, I’m also talking about my own inside,” he tells me. “It’s a daily thing not to hate yourself. Forget about outside critics — it’s the inside ones, too. That’s really our mission right now: We are consciously trying to fly the flag for love being an approach to all things. There aren’t that many [groups] that get to champion that philosophy to that many people. So we do it. And I need to hear that too, so that I don’t give up and just become bitter and twisted and hidden away, and hate everybody. I don’t want to do that, but it’s so tempting.”

What he is saying is this: radical acceptance — of others, of oneself; most especially of oneself — takes work, emotional manipulation even. Sometimes you need it writ large across a stadium of people. Sometimes you need literal fireworks.

“Maybe the theatrics are all part of that,” he ponders. “It’s a bit Disneyland-ish in terms of ‘OK, let’s exist for a couple of hours in this place where no one hates each other.’ ” Martin grins. “The second-happiest place on Earth. Copyright, Coldplay.”

COLDPLAY ARE “TRYING TO FLY THE FLAG FOR LOVE BEING AN APPROACH TO ALL THINGS.”

A WEEK LATER, we meet up at Martin’s studio in Malibu, which, on that day, could be in contention for the third-happiest place on Earth. The hexagonal wood-frame and stucco buildings, once the Malibu Playhouse and now in the process of being turned into Coldplay’s American base, give off ashram vibes, clustered near the top of a hill that rolls down to the shimmering sea. Rows of crops stretch in one direction, tended by a cheerful young man named Sam. Bees from the property’s apiary buzz giddily through the asters (later, when one lands on Martin’s lunch, he’ll comment on its arrival and then let it rest there indefinitely). Light shines abundantly.

The night before, Martin had presumably stayed up into the early morning hours, as he typically does. “There’s music flying around,” he says of that time of night, though, truth be told, “songs pop up everywhere. They wake you up, songs. They’re always a surprise to me. Sometimes the title is way ahead, and it’s waiting for the song to come, the right song. There was about six shitty ‘Viva La Vidas,’ and then the actual one.” He says most great songwriters feel this way, that the craft, the discipline, is in simply paying attention and waiting for what arrives. “Paul Simon, who I love speaking to, will say, ‘I’m not writing anything. But then I wake up and there’s a song knocking on the door. And I have to get out and do it.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know that feeling.’ ” 

We’re talking in the raftered room of the Rainforest where the past two albums had been “organized,” as he put it. Song titles from Moon Music are written in colored marker on the white, shiplap walls. Resting on the mantle of a rocky hearth are a vase of dried flowers, a Polaroid camera, a hand-signed card from BTS, and a framed copy of Max Martin’s “12 Commandments” (“Thou shall kill thy darlings … Thou shall dare to suck …”). Martin had arrived with a gift for me, a bound collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, which he’d mentioned in New Zealand when he was talking about how he loved “being lost in a dream world,” how he was “as obsessed with Mary Poppins as I’m with Radiohead.” He turns to the table of contents, and with a blue marker, he marks the stories he loves most. He says he once had a party trick: Read a sentence from any page, and he’d have been able to tell you what story it was from. He doesn’t think he’d be able to do it anymore. I turn to page 327 and read a few nondescript lines. “That’s not ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,’ is it?” he asks. (It is.)

He’d awoken this morning around 9 a.m., still jet-lagged from being on the other side of the world (“Jet lag is emotionally distorting, isn’t it? It’s also interesting coming back to America — just trying not to watch the news”). He’d meditated for 21 minutes. He’d said “my version of prayers, just sending thoughts out to people.” He’d done free-form writing for 12 minutes and then, as he always does, had burned what he’d written or flushed it down the toilet, a sort of exorcism. “I say things in there that you wouldn’t believe — they’re just the meanest, nastiest, most aggressive, angry parts of you — but no one reads them. I destroy them after I’ve written [them],” he explains. “But they’re out.” 

As we make our way out to the backyard, he stops at an upright piano with its front panel removed, slides onto the bench, and asks if I want to hear an instrumental piece he’s been working on. The song — he can’t remember what he’d decided to name it — is calming and slightly mannered, its trills like the tinkling of a fountain. 

“Something like that,” he says after a minute or two, lifting his hands off the keys and kissing the piano quickly. “I’m not playing it very well. It’s going to be good one day, when I know how to play it.”

Outside, lunch (an autumnal kale salad for me; meat croquettes on gluten-free bread for Martin) has been set up on a picnic table under the boughs of a large tree. Behind Martin, the side of a building is painted with a seascape and signed “Apple & Chris.” “​I like [my kids] very much. Even though they’re not biologically mine — I’m breaking the story now,” he jokes. “My favorite new thing to embarrass my son is, if we’re walking down the street and someone comes up to us and they say, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you while you’re with your son,’ I say, ‘That’s not my son. That’s my partner.’ ” He laughs deeply. “Yeah. I like them a lot. I think they are mine, to be fair.”

He tells me that next week he’s headed to Paris to attend the renowned Le Bal Des Débutantes with Apple, 20, which is “so not something I ever thought I’d do, but because I’m so in love with her, I’m like, ‘OK.’ ” Plus, now that Moses, 18, is off at college as well, it’s an opportunity for the whole family to be together. “It’s sad,” he says of empty nesting. “That’s the only word. But of course it’d be weirder if they were still like, ‘I can’t leave.’ Then you’d be more worried.” 

Soon, we’re talking about the yin and yang of attachment, the idea that the more you love someone, the harder it is to lose them — a theme spattered not just across Ghost Stories, the 2014 album written in the turmoil of Martin’s split from Gwyneth Paltrow, but across all of Coldplay’s discography. In March, rumors spread of Martin’s engagement to longtime partner Dakota Johnson; of late, tabloids have been floating the idea that the relationship has cooled. Martin doesn’t want to talk about any of that because, he says, it’s not just his story to tell. “It is important to say that [romantic love] is such a big factor in everything, even though it feels right to keep it precious and private; I’m not denying its power,” he concedes. He does mention Johnson in passing a number of times, including telling me that they listened to Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour together in the past couple of days. Later, he says he has only a handful of best friends, and then lists them: “Phil, Dakota, Jonny, Will, and Guy. My kids.” 

Perhaps the idea of a lovelorn Martin just fits the collective narrative. Martin was writing breakup songs well before he lost his virginity at 22 or even had a relationship to break up from. “There’s a part of me that’s always been a bit heartbroken from the beginning,” he says. “Maybe about the world, maybe just about the human condition. I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious. I don’t care if it sounds pretentious, it’s true. I’ve always had this deep joy mixed with a deep sadness.” 

He was 11 the first time he felt empathy wash over him with such strength that it surprised him. “I remember sitting with this other kid on a minibus, and I could just tell that there was stuff going on, but we didn’t know how to articulate anything. Just like, ‘Why do I feel so strongly what this guy is going through?’ It’s a strange part of me that I feel people’s sadness really heavily. And my own shit I feel pretty heavily. Maybe that’s just being human. Or maybe you need to feel that if you’re the kind of person songs get sent to.” 

However it happened — and whatever its result — it is a trademark quality. “He was there for me when I got separated and was heartbroken,” his longtime friend Shakira tells me. “He was checking in every day to see how I was doing, sending me words of support and strength and wisdom. I see him as a person who sees life through a different lens, who’s sensitive to other people’s needs and very empathetic, very empathetic.” 

Growing up hyper-religious in Devon, England, the oldest son of an accountant and a music teacher from Zimbabwe, Martin was raised with “the prospect of heaven and hell looming ever large,” as he told Rolling Stone in 2008. The first live event he ever attended was a Billy Graham satellite broadcast. The first music festivals he went to were Christian-music festivals. He went to a cathedral choir school, but “wasn’t good enough to be in the choir.” Then, at age 13, he started boarding at the crusty and uppercrust Sherborne School, meeting Phil Harvey — Coldplay’s manager and unofficial fifth member— in line for the machine that toasted bread. 

“In Central Feeding,” Harvey will later specify. “Central Feeding was the name of the cafeteria. I mean, that really gives you an insight into the school. It was very impersonal, a tough environment. Bands were not a thing at our school. Rugby was a thing.”

At Sherborne, Martin was president of the Sting fan club, played with Harvey in an (all-white) blues band called the Rockin’ Honkies, and was mercilessly bullied. “You see Chris now, and he’s like this six-foot-two, ripped, statuesque, very imposing figure,” Harvey says. “But back then he was gangly, awkward, fey. Hugely feminine elements to him — I think he’d be the first to say that — but at boys’ boarding school, there’s no nuance. They sensed weakness and soft spots, and they just went for it. It was pretty brutal.”

It didn’t help that he was still a self-professed “zealot,” still loomed over by the prospect of heaven and hell, terrified of even thinking about boobs and also terrified of not thinking about them because the most terrifying prospect was that he might be gay. “All of that dogma and telling kids that they’re sinners when they’re six is a pretty strange thing to do,” Martin says now when I bring it up. “And that takes a lifetime to unravel. It takes years and albums to shed.”

Harvey says that humor became Martin’s defense mechanism (“He’s always been able to switch on that; if he decides he wants to make you laugh, he’ll make you laugh”). Slowly, too, his naivety and theological rigidity began to fall away. “I don’t think that being gay is wrong, and I don’t think anyone deserves to burn in hell for eternity,” Martin shares. “That’s a bit over the top.”

In 1996, the four members of Coldplay met in Ramsey Hall their first week at University College London. Not long after, Martin heard Buckland playing guitar from behind the door of his dorm room. “He was like a whirlwind,” Buckland tells me. “Just, ‘Oh, you play the guitar? Brilliant. Let’s do something.’ ” They started rehearsing in the dorm bathroom, where the acoustics were good. Berryman joined a few months later, Champion a few months after that, when the drummer they’d been working with checked out in the middle of a recording session (he ended up playing in Keane). The band members signed a record deal in April 1999 and then took their final exams a month later. For someone from Martin’s background, the idea of being a rock star was so implausible that during this time a woman came up to his father at a luncheon and said, “I’m so sorry to hear about your son.” “She was deadly serious,” Martin says. “ ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your son wasting all that education.’ And to be fair to my dad, I think he said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’ll be all right.’ ”

“I NEED OUR MUSIC MORE THAN ANYONE. THOSE SONGS ARE THERAPY AND CATHARSIS AND EXPLAINING.”

In some ways, it was; in some ways, it wasn’t. As Coldplay’s sound grew to fill arenas, the inevitable backlash started, the allegations that they made “music for bed wetters,” that they were too middle-class, too earnest, too nice. (“I think we’re kind people. We’re not always nice,” Martin specifies.) The New York Times dubbed Coldplay “the most insufferable band of the decade,” in response to which Martin did not smash guitars and hotel suites but rather turned diffidence into an art form, sitting down with Rolling Stone’s Joe Levy to say he just wanted to make the band “a bit more sufferable.”

The making and release of Ghost Stories was another tenuous point. The band barely toured the album, and Martin was so down and spending so much time alone that his bandmates were worried for his safety. “Look, I’m trying to — I have to choose my words carefully,” says Harvey. “I think Chris carries a lot of pain and damage or trauma around in him. And it was embedded in there largely in those mid-teenage years. I think that he has developed a lot of mechanisms, for not controlling them, but just sort of being at peace with them and alchemizing them. He’ll be very down, and I’ll be worried about him, and it’ll seem like he’s descending into the depths of the darkest mood; and then he’ll use that desperation, that darkness as inspiration.”

As other acts from their era have broken up or petered out, Coldplay’s success has rested on Martin’s ability to alchemize, both emotionally and creatively. “I’ve been thinking about this recently,” Champion says of Coldplay’s staying power. “Chris is obviously relentless, just never stops. We always say after a leg of a tour, ‘Please just rest a little bit.’ And then within a day or two, there’s an email saying, ‘Hey, got this new idea.’ It’s wonderful. I wouldn’t ever want to take any breaks on his creativity because he really needs it to make sense of [his life].” 

And even as the band has alchemized and evolved to incorporate new trends and genres — from EDM to Afrobeats — it has managed to maintain a certain essential Coldplayness. “Our great joy is when you look out [at the audience] and there are five-year-old kids and pensioners,” Champion says. Some of that continuity is thanks to the ever-present yearning in Martin’s voice, some to the big chords and cathedral choruses, some to the lyrics that have ambiguity without a shred of subtlety. “I sometimes feel that we are most powerful in countries where they don’t really speak English,” says Martin. “I’m not the best lyricist in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but I think if you don’t speak English, there’s a feeling that you feel.”

The wind has started to pick up now, and the afternoon is cooling. We clear our plates, bringing them to the studio’s small kitchen, and then make our way to a sitting room with a view of the meadow.

I bring up happiness set points, the idea that we all have an individual baseline of happiness that, barring calamity, tends to go along with us throughout life. On a scale of one to 10, I ask, where would Martin put his happiness? “I’d say, I’m one and 10,” he replies. “They’re both equal. Meaning that more and more, I realize I’m always on both — nothing in the middle. But most of the day is spent trying to occupy the middle, what Rabin-dranath Tagore would call ‘tensegrity’ — a violin string being pulled in two directions violently, and then the music is in the middle — that’s tensegrity, tension and integrity.” 

He’s trying to explain what he means, what this tension is like, or at least where it comes from: “It’s like you start off as a band with three fans and one guy at the bar who thinks you’re shit. And then you get to a band with 3,000 fans and 10 guys on the internet who think you’re shit. And then as you become the biggest band in the world, you also become the least popular band in the world. You can never escape. You can never win, if you’re looking for just winning. The stronger the light, the darker the shadow.”

He says that certain events and writings and people have helped him deal with all of this along the way: the voice teacher who told him that, no matter what venue he was playing, he should think about the person at the very back; Bruce Springsteen’s admonition that every show might be someone’s first or someone’s last; Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning; the poems of Rumi; producer Brian Eno, who produced Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, swooping in when Coldplay were at their lowest and reminding them that making music should feel like joy; his children: “Even if you have the most dreamy setup for your child, they’ll still come home from school sad sometimes. You can’t avoid it. It’s painful to watch, but when it’s your own child, you can’t self-annihilate and you can’t blame. And it reminds you: It’s just being human.” Even the 2016 Super Bowl — which he’d performed with bestie Beyoncé and Bruno Mars and had felt pretty darn good about until he’d made the mistake of reading the reviews — even that had been a point of transition and growth. 

“This very famous person emailed me, and she said, ‘Don’t worry about what everyone’s saying.’ I was like, ‘What?’ I hadn’t looked at anything. Then I collapsed into the internet and became really down for a while.” But eventually, something else happened: He realized that, were he to do it all over again, he probably wouldn’t change a thing. “And that was some kind of weird epiphany for me.”

“HALF THE TIME I FEEL LIKE I’VE DONE NOTHING BUT FAILED MY ENTIRE LIFE. MAYBE THAT KEEPS ME GOING.”

It was also a kind of relief, because when it comes to the music, he sort of can’t change a thing, at least not when it comes to the messaging and his psychological connection to it. “I need our music more than anyone,” he explains. “Those songs, they are therapy and they are catharsis and they are explaining. And they’re full of love and acceptance and kindness. And they’re often ahead of me, in terms of what they’re singing about. They’re aspirational for me as a person.

“ ‘A Sky Full of Stars,’ for example, is about complete unconditional love for someone no matter what they do to you or if they like you or not. That’s an almost impossible place to get to in real life, but the song’s already there, like so many songs — ‘Oh, What a Wonderful World.’ They’re saying, ‘Hey, if you aim in this direction, things might get better.’ ”

He pauses and laughs. “I know this is very rock & roll,” he says, poking fun at his own goodliness. “Mainlining speedballs.” 

But here’s the thing, the possible key to Coldplay’s longevity and their whole biggest-band-in-the-worldness: What Martin is talking about sort of is rock & roll these days. Consider, please, the extent to which all the bile and bellowing of so much of the late Nineties seems hopelessly dated in 2025, a year when you can — wonder of wonders — open your phone at any minute and see, for instance, a child in Chad joyfully singing along to a song from South Korea, or men with shaved heads and face tattoos dancing to “Pink Pony Club.” How, Martin wants to know, can you do that and not burst wide open with the empathy and thrill that it provides? How can you “other” what is right there in front of your eyes? Maybe radical acceptance is actually the most … radical thing of all. 

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s all too much for you, the dancing unicorns, the rainbow hearts, the serenaded puppies. But if Coldplay are a force for good, please also consider that such a statement is not just theoretical. In November 2019, the band paused touring until its members could figure out how to continue to tour with less environmental impact, which they now have by 59 percent, according to a team of scientists at MIT they’re paying to calculate their carbon footprint and keep them honest. They printed Moon Music vinyl with plastic recovered from the floors of rivers in Malaysia and Indonesia by boats they bought to recover it. They run their show on used cooking grease, for crying out loud! They have rejected dynamic ticket pricing and pledged to donate 10 percent of their proceeds from their 2025 U.K. tour dates to the Music Venue Trust, a charity that supports grassroots music venues. Just watch their happy employees — their co-manager, their physical therapist, their social media guy, and the woman who helps them partner with accessibility and inclusion initiatives — just watch them gather to the right of the stage, grinning widely and dancing giddily to “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” before running through tunnels to catch vans out of the stadium as the last set of fireworks goes off. 

And few bands are as conscientious about pairing up with and promoting younger artists from all over the world. (The shows in Australia included not just Nigeria’s Ayra Starr and Zimbabwe’s Shone but also local talent like Becca Hatch, Jazzy K, Emmanuel Kelly, and Elly-May Barnes.) “Sometimes he seems like a kid in a candy store when it comes to music,” Shakira had told me.

Starr, who in addition to touring with Coldplay also features on the track “Good Feelings,” explains that she and Martin had been in touch for a while — texting music back and forth — before he invited her to join him in the studio. “I’m really grateful that I get the amount of support I get from him,” she adds. “When I first played him my album The Year I Turned 21, he had the nicest things to say about the project and gave me some notes and advice as the musical genius he is, though I was stubborn with some of the advice.” Even that, he took in stride. “He has a way of making you feel comfortable around him — and the most British sense of humor I’ve ever come across. I think he is not even intentionally funny. He is just direct and honest, which is very charming, especially his dad jokes.” 

The evening of the day I interviewed Martin in New Zealand, he also hosted an “artist party” at the aptly named Parachute Studios, gathering a small group of local musicians to share music they were working on. “How is the scene in New Zealand in terms of making a living from playing?” he’d (not rhetorically) asked the 12 young artists lounging on cushions around him, kicking off a discussion of coffee-shop jobs and how, in smaller countries, an artist can tour every corner and still not gain a ton of fans.

“You can’t possibly help everybody, which is such a bummer,” Martin tells me later. “But I also think the power of those meetings is to get people together themselves, in their local scene. And then you leave, and then they all hang out together, and it empowers [them].”

As we’re leaving the artist party, Martin asks if I want to meet back up at the hotel later that night. By the time we do, it’s past 10 p.m. Eventually, we make our way down to the harbor again, the air smelling fresh and briny, the water’s dark ripples lapping gently against the docks, the sky — as noted — wide and wondrous, inky and vast. “Let’s go right,” he says. “Walk around and see the big view.” 

“Look at the stars,” I find myself saying to him before even really realizing the words have left my mouth. It’s too late to take them back, but actually, I wouldn’t want to because, seriously, look at the stars! Here, on the other side of the world, they make up constellations I’ve never seen before in my life, so many constellations that possibly do shine for you and all the things that you do. Martin leans his head back and looks at them. 

“I SOMETIMES FEEL THAT WE ARE MOST POWERFUL IN COUNTRIES WHERE THEY DON’T REALLY SPEAK ENGLISH. I’M NOT THE BEST LYRICIST IN THE WORLD BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION, BUT IF YOU DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH, THERE’S A FEELING THAT YOU FEEL.”

We walk for a while, for a long time, sometimes in silence. More than once, Martin says we should turn around at a certain spot in the distance, but then when we get there, he just keeps going. We pass boats strung with Christmas lights, bobbing in the blackness. “I think one of the flip sides of the band at this point is that the adrenaline is so crazy high, and the shows are so big and everything, that then there’s a real depression crash on the other side of it,” he tells me. “It’s like you give so much openness, but it’s so hyperreal to process like that all the time. It’s ridiculous. And why it kills a lot of people. It’s a quite hazardous job. And I understand why, because it is a form of drug. So I spend a lot of time on my own really trying to stay afloat, and walking really helps me with that. And going in the ocean really helps me with that.”

He says his life back in Malibu — at a house up the road from the studio — is mostly a quiet one. He tries to swim in the ocean every day, even sometimes after dark. He watches TV, reruns of favorites like Curb Your Enthusiasm and 30 Rock. He reads. He walks. He doesn’t currently own a car. Mostly, his life is spent in service to the music, waiting for it to arrive from the cosmos or from others. “Every year there’s someone that comes, an artist or a song, an album that just puts you in your place and makes you humbled and then inspired,” he says. “What’s it been this year? Chappell Roan? I hope she’s OK. It’s hard for the younger ones, especially when they’re on their own.” He says there’s no way he’d have survived without Jonny, Will, and Guy.

For a long time now, Martin has known that Coldplay will release only two more albums — an animated musical based on a story Harvey and Martin are writing together, and a final album, simply called Coldplay, which will be a sort of homecoming to the band’s original sound. “The cover of the album, I’ve known it since 1999,” Martin says. “It’s a photograph by the same photographer that took the photo that’s the cover of our first EP.” After that, the band will continue to tour, a legacy act in the process of living out its legacy. 

“Chris is never going to stop writing, so I kind of take it with a little bit of a pinch of salt,” Berryman had told me in Australia. “We’re still years away from any kind of retirement. But I think you have to have a plan. If you’re running a marathon, you know you have to run 26 miles. But if somebody said to you, ‘OK, start running and just don’t stop,’ it’s quite hard to motivate yourself.”

Whatever the next stage looks like, Martin wants to pay homage to all those songs that have arrived over the decades but didn’t fit within the “picture frame” of any given album. “One day we’ll do a thing called Alphabetica, which will be lots of outtakes and songs that didn’t fit anywhere, but we’ll release them in a compendium. We’ll do a song that begins with A, and one that begins with B, because there’s enough to do that —we don’t have any spare songs with Q. That’s the one I’m stuck with.” 

Eventually, we do turn back toward the hotel, but not before Martin asks, “How’s your swimming?”

“My nightswimming?” I reply, referencing the R.E.M. song. “Deserves a quiet night.”

He likes this response. “One of the best songs ever. R.E.M., for so many of us, are such a big deal.” 

He’s quiet for a moment. It’s a funny thing, really, to ponder legacy. “Half the time I feel like I’ve done nothing but failed my entire life,” he says. “But maybe that’s one of the things that keeps me going — a strong feeling every day about how ‘You’ve fucked it all up. You could have been great.’ And that’s OK, because it gives you something to work through, and work with. I’m a human. And that’s OK,” he says, to himself as much as anyone. “That’s OK.” 

“I am the disease and the cure,” I offer, my own little affirmation.

“Yeah,” Martin says.

“Yeah,” I reply.

He looks out to where the stars reflect off the water. “We have a line like that, in a song called ‘Clocks.’ ”

“I was quoting you to you,” I affirm.

He nods slowly. “You know, what’s interesting is that the cure for most things is in the toxin. The antidote for most poisons is the poison itself. The toxin is often the remedy. Often the thing that’s causing your pain also contains its own solution. Isn’t that amazing?”

“There’s a metaphor in there somewhere,” I tell him.

And Martin, earnest Martin, frontman of the biggest and kindest and most earnest band in the world, widens his eyes and smiles.