Coldplay? Not My Cup Of Tea.

There are some teams in your lifetime that you just love to hate. You hate them because they seem to win everything, which in itself sucks, but that kind of success brings with it a horde of fans and supporters that are commonly called 'fair-weather'. A fair-weather fan is someone who only supports a team because they're winning. Once the success goes, so too will the fan. Coldplay is one of those teams.

Of course Coldplay is a band, not a team. Well not a sports team anyway. And as the old saying goes ‘there is no 'I' in team’ just as there is no 'Chris Martin in Coldplay’, only in case there is, because he’s the lead singer, lead writer and lead attention getter.

They may well share everything equally, but it’s Martin who is Coldplay. He's the one who gets to do the duet with Kanye, not the other three jokers. He's the one snapped by the paps whilst out and about with his equally famous missus (and onetime ClubDes trampoline girl) Gwyneth Paltrow, not the other three fellas. Who knows if they even have girlfriends? Who cares - they're not Chris Martin.

Now I like Chris Martin. He's a talented man who uses his immense profile and position as lead singer of Coldplay to get in behind some extremely worthy causes, like Oxfam. He likes to wear lots of beads and wristbands and eclectic shirt and jacket combos. He sends encrypted messages to the legion of fans who would love to have a duvet made from his pubes by wearing strategically placed tape on his fingers. He has piercing blue eyes that you should never look straight into. Ever. And he loves the environment so much he called his daughter Apple for which she will be eternally resentful, especially when she hits college and all the 'I'd like a mouthful of Apple' jokes start. Yet, despite all this goodness I still think that I liked him a whole lot better when he was just the nerdy guy singing 'Yellow' whilst walking on the beach in the rain.

Friends of ours chose that track as their wedding song. I thought it odd at the time and I still can't get my head around. It reminds me of how in the seventies the Procol Harlem song 'Whiter Shade of Pale' was one of the most popular wedding songs of it's generation, despite being completely and utterly about snorting coke. Love might make you blind but it doesn't make you deaf for fucks sake. The same sort of social cock up was recounted by the very sexy Dido at the concert of hers that my wife and I attended a few years ago. Dido found it quite bemusing that her song about helping a needle popping mate go cold turkey was being used in weddings across the UK. I just found Dido incredibly hot. I had an erection the whole night.

But my point is that back when Martin was the silly looking guy in the soaked anorak, Coldplay were cool because they were different - well somewhat, they were admittedly ripping off Radiohead in their glory days - but their fans dug them because of their music, not their politics, not their bracelet wearing, not because of Gwyneth and not because of Chris Martin. Somewhere between the first and second albums they became the Manchester United of music and fittingly, the fair-weather community stopped buying U2 and moved on in.

Comparisons to U2, that other most influential band ever were always inevitable. How the planet copes with two sources of infinite musical inspiration is beyond me. Why when I picked up my guitar the other day I just couldn't decide what to play, so I had a big wank instead. Incidentally, did you know that wanking got it's name from the sound wooden beds made back in the day when boys first started treating their bodies like a fairground ride; 'wankwankwankwankwank'.

Martin is a huge U2 fan actually and when amongst friends sometimes compares himself to Bono, even going as far as calling himself 'Crono'. Why he doesn't compare himself to Bob Geldolf, the man behind both Live Aid concerts I don't know. It was Bob, not Bono who saved the world first. I suspect it’s because Geldolf is quite ugly where as Martin is a very pretty man. Bono is somewhere in between I suppose, depending on which side of poo bay you like to drop your anchor.

For the record I prefer U2. They don't have fair-weather radio stations like ZM peddling them and their upcoming concert as the second coming, or fair-weather friends gushing over just how liberating they are. I've listened to a lot of Coldplay in a desperate attempt to like them and thus feel fulfilled in my life and I do like one or two tracks, but it all sounds the fucken same to me and I have exquisite musical taste. Not that sounding the same is necessarily a bad thing, you could say that of any band of course, but this is supposedly the biggest band in the world we’re talking about, could they not mix it up a bit? Geez even U2 went a bit fruity with their Pop album.

Oh and most importantly, I know the names of all the geezers in U2. Even their real ones. Coldplay? Not my cup of tea.