Coldplay: the anatomy of new album A Head Full of Dreams, featuring President Obama, Beyonce, and Gwyneth Paltrow
Maybe you really do hate Coldplay. A small number of those who claim to must. However, it’s more likely you feel ambivalent. And it’s even more likely that you secretly like them, if only a bit.
Sure, Chris Martin’s no Kanye West — you don’t get kudos for knowing the words to Fix You. But aren’t you tired of fake hate? This album around, why don’t you stick your neck out?
For Coldplay have clout. More impressively, it is clout achieved by stealth and in the face of misfired venom. While small-minded people carped and crowed about how rubbish they were, the band assembled a crack team of influential people to guest star on their new album, A Head Full of Dreams. Very influential people: these are not “social-media slebs”, but “leaders of the free world”. Literally, Obama is on the album. It is released today.
Now is the time for you to stand up and be counted. Point out that Coldplay have sold more than 100 million records since they were founded in 1997. A Head Full of Dreams is their seventh studio album.
The band are worth about £317 million and when they announced a tour for June 2016 they had to add two London dates due to “pheonomenal demand”, which suggests a lot of people in London are lying about how they feel about Coldplay.
Here’s what you need to know to cram your Head Full of Dreams and make it as a nu-wave fan.
The art
Enigmatic visual teasers on the Tube, and later on Twitter, were the first clues that a new album was coming. Granted, that sounds like the sort of canny viral marketing campaign a young, hip band would launch. In fact it sounds similar to what Arcade Fire did a few years ago.
Clearly it must be a case of the proverbial monkeys with typewriters, cry the haters: if you unleash Chris Martin for long enough, at some point he will do something significant. There’s no way he’s got insight or anything.
Anyway, posters started appearing underground: a black background on which was printed a series of colourful, interlocking circles and the date, December 4.
Fans noticed that the motif resembled one on a T-shirt Chris Martin wore at the Global Citizen Festival in New York last month. Fans speculated. Coldplay posted the image on their Twitter. Fans noticed that too.
Ultimately, a new album was announced — William Hill is giving odds of 4/1 that Coldplay will headline next year’s Glastonbury.
— Coldplay (@coldplay) November 2, 2015
The theory
The enigmatic teaser campaign chimes with the theory of the album, as defined by Chris Martin. “It’s our seventh thing and, the way we look at it, it’s like the last Harry Potter book. Not to say that there might not be another, but this is the completion of something. I have to think of it as the final thing, otherwise we wouldn’t put everything into it.”
The first family connection
As collaborators go, President Obama is a coup. Sure he’s our ally, but we haven’t yet managed to coax him to sing karaoke at our Christmas party.
Technically, it is a clip rather than a guest spot: Mr President did not jam with the band. A sample of Obama singing Amazing Grace at Clementa C Pinckney’s funeral is featured on tracks seven and 10. Pinckney was assassinated in the Charleston Church massacre in June 2015.
The second family connection
The Obamas are the first family, Beyoncé and Jay-Z the second. The group have been friends for years: Bey lipsynched at Potus’s inauguration in 2013, and in September Michelle O joined Beyoncé at the Global Citizen Festival — the same one where Chris Martin wore his enigmatic T-shirt. The plot thickens.
Beyoncé’s vocals are featured on two tracks, one of which was played for the first time on Annie Mac’s show on Radio 1 on Monday, when the DJ named it her “hottest record in the world”.
The song is called Hymn for the Weekend and opens and closes with Beyoncé. At one point she promises to “shoot across the sky”. Trills and unclear threats aside she stays rather quiet.
Coldplay bassist Guy Berryman told Mac that Beyoncé was “in and out in five minutes”. Tech website The Verge concludes that “sadly, it shows” and criticises the obvious message (“Martin falls back on well-worn club metaphors, ‘Life’s a drink, and love’s a drug’, he sings”). However, perhaps the band should be applauded: if “Chris Martin in da club” doesn’t quite work, at least it’s a departure from type.
The ex files
Coldplay metaphors are blunt: they do not coax your subconscious but thwack you over the head with their “message”. This is fine, for subtlety is overrated. Plus, this means it is easier to speculate about the sauce behind the song.
Last year Martin and his wife Gwyneth Paltrow “consciously uncoupled”. Clearly, though, this was no ordinary break-up: Gwyneth also features on the album. If you found out your ex was on Oxford Street while you were also shopping you would leave the area immediately — this is an astonishing act of unity.
Paltrow’s voice is featured on Everglow, which The New York Times review insists is “a piano ballad about the spark that endures between the uncoupled”. The lyrics do gesture towards it: Martin invokes a “particular diamond” that is “extra special”.
The new girlfriend
But Cupid has not forsaken Martin. After reportedly dating Jennifer Lawrence, he is now reportedly dating actress Anabelle Wallis, who also appears on the album.
Presumably a Martin-Paltrow Christmas is the kind that defies belief and reality: ex-husbands sharing mirth and stockings with new boyfriends; stepsiblings promising to introduce each other to colleagues offering career legs-up; ex-wives and new girlfriends cooking the nut roast together...
The Britpop connection
It just wouldn’t be a mash-up without Noel Gallagher, who plays a guitar solo on Up&Up. Noel has performed a U-turn: a few months ago he criticised Chris Martin for backing Jay-Z’s music service, Tidal. “They were like, ‘We’re going to f***ing save the music business’,” he crowed. “And I’m just sitting there, thinking: ‘You might want to write a decent chorus for a f***ing start. Never mind f***ing royalties. Write a tune. F***ing start with that’.”
Seems Noel, like the rest of you, has decided he’s wrong.
Follow Phoebe Luckhurst on Twitter: @phoebeluckhurst
ArticleColdplay: the anatomy of new album A Head Full of DreamsColdplayGwyneth PaltrowBeyonceBarack ObamaChris Martin has pulled together a stellar set of friends to join in on his latest record
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