James Blake has done something not many people have done in recent years: he’s defended Coldplay.
The 36-year-old producer was talking on Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw’s BBC podcast, Sidetracked, when discussion turned to the notion of ‘cool’ and, in particular, Jack Whitehall’s description of Coldplay at the Brit Awards last weekend as a “public school Nickelback”.
This seemed to get Blake’s goat. “Coldplay bashing has got to stop,” he stormed. “It’s not cool anymore! It’s not cool anymore to just be like ‘Coldplay’s not cool.’ Just fuck off,” he said. “There are so many amazing Coldplay songs. And Chris Martin is clearly a melodic genius.”
“[If] you don’t like the sound of their last few records, OK. When you go and see them at Glastonbury, did you like a lot of the songs? Probably,” he continued. “Maybe the band changed the way they dressed? Are we not allowed to change the way we dress? Are we not allowed to bloody write songs in a different genre? Like, who cares, man? I get really a bit irate about this!”
Evidently. It is refreshing, though, to see someone defend Coldplay, who seem to have taken over from U2 as the band that a certain type of music fan loves to sneer at. Partly, you suspect that this is down to Chris Martin and co’s utter lack of cynicism, side or irony, but their huge success probably also has something to do with it, too.
Not that the band themselves have ever seemed particularly bothered by this state of affairs. In an interview last year with Rolling Stone, Chris Martin said that they were relaxed about where they were in terms of public perception.
“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 explained. “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.’”
And they continue to do very well. In January Coldplay broke the record for the largest stadium shows of the 21st Century when more than 223,000 punters saw them across two nights at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, India. To date, their two-year long Music Of The Spheres World Tour has grossed an (ahem) cool $1.14 billion.
