Coldplay have become such a monstrously big entity in modern music that it’s easy to forget they, you know, they have released several really good records over the years. They did not become one of the world’s biggest bands just because they have a fantastic array of fireworks at their gigs, even if they do have a mesmeric handle on pyrotechnic. Theirs is a career built on intricate, stirring singalongs and melancholic ballads that somehow transmitted a certain euphoria – the dazzling showmanship came second. Their 2000 debut Parachutes, which turns 25 this week, is where it all began.
A quietly mesmeric debut, its huge success was by no means assured, its four creators - Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman and Will Champion – bearing no resemblance to future superstars at the time. They looked exactly like what they were – four well-spoken young men fresh out of uni who’d never seen a hairbrush and would have zero issues with eating a Chicken & Mushroom Pot Noodle for breakfast. Coldplay had the potential and the tunes alright – early, pre-Parachutes releases The Blue Room EP, Brothers & Sisters and Shiver had suggested there was something magical stirring – but they were a long way from possessing their contemporary swagger. At that point, walking onstage at Wembley Stadium, where Coldplay will play ten sold out shows this summer, would’ve had them in therapy for the rest of the year.
This was a band wracked with uncertainty. The quartet had met at university in London in 1996 and played their first gig in 1998 but the idea of recording their debut album was doing funny things to their nervous system. Despite their label Parlophone, to whom they’d signed mid-boat trip on the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park, giving them a year to play shows and tighten up, they were still a way off being ready.
“Those early gigs were great, we were so raw and fresh, we didn’t know anything, it was really good that our label let us just go and do these small shows for a year,” Chris Martin recalled to Radio 2 a few years ago. “They didn’t force us to do our album straight away after we signed, they let us learn about the studio, we did The Blue Room EP. We were really trying to find our voice in that time.”
When it came to making an album proper, producer Ken Nelson was required to be the adult in the room. “Parachutes felt like such a big learning experience for us,” guitarist Jonny Buckland said. “We didn’t really know what we were doing and luckily we had Ken Nelson to guide us because we were basically just kids. He was so reassuring. Chris can be up and down about songs and he was steady and kind.”
It was during a frustrating night recording at the remote Rockfield Studios in Wales that Nelson’s role of mentor inadvertently inspired the band to write their breakthrough hit. The session was not going well and, trying to alleviate the growing anguish, the producer gave the band some advice. “Go outside and look at the stars,” he told them. You know what’s coming next. Martin had been listening to Neil Young’s classic Harvest album and a melody popped into his head as he was taking in some air, returning to the studio singing it in a mock Young twang. Eventually, he sung it in his own voice, Buckland added a soaring guitar line and the band realised they’d just pulled something special out of the ether.
“It was obvious within the first few bars of him singing it that we had something that was going to be quite a pivotal moment on the album because it was such an obvious great melody and it was simple,” bassist Guy Berryman remembered. “We recorded it quite quickly. When Yellow came along, it solidified everything else on the album and allowed us to have those quieter moments.”
For a record mostly made from a set-up of acoustic-led, mid-tempo tracks, the key to Parachutes is the amount of sonic gear-changes it subtly shifts through. There’s the wistful, dreamy strums of Don’t Panic, the wiry sense of something unsettling on Spies, the plaintive, John Martyn-style folk of Never Change, the gospel-ish defiance of Everything’s Not Lost, the hypnotic, rolling piano chords of Trouble. Parachutes probably would’ve done pretty well without Yellow, with its alchemical meld of yearning hooks, buzzsaw guitars and thumping drums, but it was the song that made it all hang together.
It was certainly the song that propelled them to stardom, released two weeks before Parachutes and going to Number Four in the UK charts. Its parent album went to Number One and, by the end of the year, it had sold a million copies. But success brought up a new set of problems. Whether it be dealing with life in the spotlight, a backlash summed up in some needlessly mean comments from Alan McGee, Coldplay were still the doub-filled crew of a year earlier. Going to the top of the charts was not a fix for that.
Martin, in particular, fretted during interviews at what might come out of his mouth and how the band might be portrayed. "We come on a bit earnest," he told Select’s Dorian Lynskey in early 2001. "A bit Honest John: [in a simpleton's accent] 'All we know how to do is play songs'. But I worry about our image becoming more important than the music. I like seeing posters for the LP on the Tube because it's our album being famous, not us for going out with the Appleton sisters."
"We come across boringly because we don't want to give a lot away," he continued. "So the angle is we're southern college boys who don't know much about anything.”
Of course, Chris Martin did end up becoming more famous for his relationship, marrying (and subsequently ‘consciously uncoupling’ from) Hollywood star Gwyneth Paltrow. By that point, Coldplay had dealt with the imposter syndrome brought on by the success of Parachutes by writing a masterpiece second record in A Rush Of Blood To The Head. It wouldn’t be all plain sailing from here, far from it, but Coldplay would never again be the wet-behind-the-ears bunch who made Parachutes. Perhaps that mix of fragile confidence and blossoming talent is what makes their debut such an enthralling listen 25 years down the line.
