Coldplay: Day 8
Source: Billboard
Starting off this post with a nice little picture of the band. Man look at those cute little guys! This photo was apparently taken sometime around the year 2000, the same year Parachutes was released, and the year of their first concert tour (Wikipedia). Chris Martin was 23 that year! Of course this isn't incredibly young for a musical artist, but it still really puts their music into perspective, knowing they were all in their early 20s (or maybe late-teens) when they wrote these early songs. Just for fun here's a comparison of him then and now, he's definitely a bit more grizzled, but he still looks young.
"Pretty, lovely, fine, fair, comely, pleasant, agreeable, acceptable, adequate, satisfactory, nice, benign, harmless, innocuous, innocent, largely unobjectionable, safe, forgettable,"
and ended it with this line,
"Parachutes is ultimately a promising debut for Coldplay, if by "promising," I mean, "promising them a windfall of cash and international popularity." If nothing else, it's harmless and pretty. Unfortunately, it's nothing else. If that's what you look for in your music, by all means, go for it. If you want substance, I suggest moving on."
Although elsewhere, and especially in hindsight, Parachutes was well-received critically, this early opinion on Coldplay is prophetic on how many people would choose to view them throughout their career.
But critical opinion on Coldplay aside, the reason I chose to talk a little about the state of Coldplay at this time is because today I'm recapping my listening to the last few songs that were released in what could be called the Parachutes era. In 2002, Coldplay would release their second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, but before getting there, they had a few little releases here and there over about a year and a half. Most of these songs are re-releases, but I'll talk about a couple including one which has actually recently become one of my favorite Christmas songs of all time. Be warned though, I'm gonna do a semi-deep dive into some weird discrepancies between what music is listed on Spotify and what their actual discography is, which might be boring to some people idk.
So on Spotify, the date is listed as October 26, 2000 for when Coldplay released the single "Trouble" (with this fancy new album art), along with a couple other tracks: Brothers & Sisters (a re-release from The Blue Room EP), and Shiver (Jo Whiley Lunchtime Special).
This is the next release on Spotify after the full album Parachutes. This is all fine and good, and Wikipedia mostly agrees with this, saying that yes, at least one version of the release looked like this (although it lists the date as October 23, 2000). The other two versions of the release are not on Spotify.
Several months later, the next release on Spotify is a single release centered around Don't Panic.
As an aside, this album art is interesting and definitely seems to recall the album art for Yellow.
It also looks like this flower-thing is getting nuked though, which doesn't seem to fit the vibe of the song.
Anyways though, things start to get weird here. It's probably a little hard to tell from this picture, but there is no version of the single release that matches what is on Spotify. The first one should probably be it, but there is no song called "Bigger Stronger (live from Norway)" on Spotify. Funnily enough they do get the date right: March 19, 2001.
The last release on Spotify before it rolls over to A Rush of Blood to the Head-era songs, is the Christmas song I mentioned, which is actually a cover of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, and apparently released on November 30, 2001. This release though, was actually not just a single, as it says on Spotify, but was part of a Christmas EP! In fact, if you can see from this screenshot, there are actually FOUR EPs that are part of their official discography but not on Spotify: Safety, which apparently is their actual first official release; Acoustic, a live EP for Trouble (also seen in a previous screenshot), and then the Christmas EP which was called Mince Spies. So there is actually quite a bit of early music released by Coldplay that is simply not on Spotify.
That's basically it for the semi-deep dive into their discography, but reading these EP descriptions is fun because it tells a little story about the early days of Coldplay, and about making music. In the description for Safety, we can see that they printed 500 physical copies financed by their manager at 1500 pounds. It seems like such a fragile thing, probably playing random gigs and hawking their CDs to audience members to see if they could catch on. Of course for them they did catch on, before even releasing their first album, and never really looked back in terms of popularity. Anyways though, to me it's also interesting to think about these exclusive versions of songs that are floating around out there somewhere. Somewhere in London there's probably some 40-60 year old guys who have one of 500 physical copies of Safety, or who own one of 1,000 copies of Mince Spies. I wonder how many of these copies got scratched, or left in the car CD player for too long, or thrown in a box and broken. Of course these days I'm guessing you can find these songs on YouTube for the most part, so it's not like they're gone forever. And if you do happen to have a physical copy, well you can always do this:
To finish off though, I'll just highlight a couple of songs from these releases. In the Don't Panic single release, they included a song called "You Only Live Twice - Live from Norway." I thought this was pretty mediocre, but off of a whim I decided to see if it was a cover, and yes it is! If there's any James Bond fans out there, this is a cover of a song from the closing credits of the James Bond movie with the same title. I honestly liked the original a lot more than the cover though. Lastly though, my favorite song from this batch, liked I mentioned, is their cover of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. This is a Christmas song that I never had any specific love for growing up, so I was surprised at how much I liked it. The song is slow, with a soft piano, and Chris Martin's voice just brings up so much nostalgia and *Christmas* feeling when you listen to it.
I also love the album cover.
Trouble, Brothers & Sisters, Shiver (Jo Whiley Lunchtime Social) - October 26, 2000
Don't Panic, "You Only Live Twice - Live from Norway" - March 19, 2001
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Jo Whiley, BBC Radio 1 Session) - November 30, 2001
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That album cover is really cool
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