An archive of early Coldplay recordings is heading to auction this week.
The studio tapes, alternate mixes and demos from the formative sessions that helped shape Coldplay’s debut album, Parachutes, offer a rare look at the band before it broke worldwide.
The bulk of the collection comes from British producer, mixer and engineer Chris Allison, and centres on Coldplay’s Blue Room sessions at London’s Orinoco Studios.
The auction house describes the material as a “window into the period that laid the groundwork for Parachutes”, which includes the album track High Speed, a previously unheard take of We Never Change, and a nine-track cassette holding some of the band’s earliest known recordings, two of them never released.
Among the more unusual items, the auction house has shared that the archive contains an acoustic demo that Chris Martin recorded as a pitch for the title song of the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. The assignment ultimately went to Garbage, whose song became the official theme.
“This is a window into the writing, recording, production and promotion of some uniquely celebrated music artists, pieces of music history that deserve to be in the hands of fans, not gathering dust in a storage unit,” Allison said in a statement.
The auction on Wax Poetics runs until Sunday, 19 July.
