Play It as It Feels

Chris Martin is a tall, strapping young man, but his singing voice is a fragile thing--at least when it’s subjected to the erratic hours and conditioned air of life on tour with his band, Coldplay.

Martin, a novice to the game, eagerly follows the medical lore proffered by fellow musicians, embracing a regimen of cinnamon and oils and other cures to keep the pipes humming.

“I’m a real prima donna when it comes to that,” Martin admits with a smile as he sits in a West Hollywood hotel room.

With good reason. On Coldplay’s debut album, “Parachutes,” he sometimes works himself up into a Bono-like lather, but he’s no rock shouter or growler. The deepest impression is made by his intimate, conversational purr, and by what’s already become an unmistakable signature--falsetto phrases so smooth and natural that you hardly notice the technique as you register the emotional message.

It’s a device that’s helped make the English band’s first U.S. single, the clamorous ballad “Yellow,” an inescapable radio presence, and draw a growing audience to Coldplay’s melancholy mix of rainy-day chords and heart-on-sleeve lyrics.

“When I was writing things, it was just where the tune wanted to go” says Martin, 23, who had some formal voice training as a teenager. “I don’t remember thinking, ‘Right, I’ll try that.’ ”

Now Martin’s singing voice is a valuable thing as well, the identifying feature of a band that has come out of nowhere to become one of the year’s commercial and critical breakthroughs.

The groundswell began in England, where “Yellow” was an immediate hit last summer, leading to “band of the year” declarations from the music media and three Brit Award nominations. The group won two of the awards last week, for best British band and best British album.

Reviewers have rallied behind Coldplay’s forthright, mid-tempo music as a refreshing return to classic rock values and unaffected emotion. The music’s modalities reinforce Martin’s lyrics of restlessness and melancholy, but the downbeat side is balanced by the reassurance in his voice and his determination to resist despair--an approach that’s summarized in the album’s opening song, “Don’t Panic”:

Bones, sinking like stones

All that we’ve fought for,

Homes, places we’ve grown

All of us are done for

We live in a beautiful world

yeah we do, yeah we do. . . .

With “Yellow” beginning to duplicate its initial success at modern-rock stations in other radio formats and with the group on its first U.S. tour, a repetition of the U.K. success--something that’s eluded its countrymen recently--seems within reach.

“There’s been a lot of problems breaking English artists in North America, ever since Oasis blew it for everyone,” says Terry McBride, chief executive officer of Nettwerk America, the Capitol Records joint venture that signed Coldplay. “I’m willing to bet that radio will be a lot more open-minded to the next Travis record and to other English artists. As long as we don’t get a bunch of pompous twits flippin’ off everyone, things should be fine for a while.

“This band’s the real deal,” adds McBride, who manages Sarah McLachlan, Dido and Barenaked Ladies, and is also Coldplay’s U.S. manager. “I think there’s an audience hearing ‘Yellow,’ liking it because it sticks out like a sore thumb, going out and buying the album and finding something they can really grab onto.”

The album has sold nearly 300,000 copies, and it jumped to No. 20 in Southern California following the band’s two sold-out shows last month at L.A.’s Mayan Theatre, where Martin, guitarist Jon Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion bonded easily with their audience by delivering on their promise--direct, felt performances, a sense of intelligence, and Martin’s casually friendly manner.

“I spend more time not being a rock star than being a rock star, so I tend to stay in non-rock star mode,” the singer says. “Try as I might, I can’t be as glamorous as Bono or someone like that. . . . He’s good at being a rock star because he’s been one for 20 years. Or Liam [Gallagher] from Oasis, he’s like that. You’ve just got to be whatever you’re like.”

*

What Chris Martin is like is something of a preoccupation of the music press in England. And the composite profile is a sort of anti-Eminem: a self-deprecating lad who doesn’t drink or take drugs and who graduated from college with a degree in ancient history after signing his record deal.

“And I wear a habit,” Martin adds, joking about the characterization, which is basically true, at least for him.

“But I don’t care. That’s what I want to do. . . . It’s difficult. I hate the whole branding thing--’Oh, they’re the nice Radiohead.’ These little tags. But they stick to every band. Every band has it.”

But there’s one bit of branding that makes him bristle: that of Coldplay as a conservative counterbalance to rock’s stereotypic wild, anarchic side.

“You just have to be true to yourself,” he says with a flash of vehemence. “To me rock ‘n’ roll means to do what you want, when you want to do it, and that’s something we’ve always done and will always do. Nobody tells us what we have to do, nobody tells us how we have to sound. Sometimes it’s just as rebellious to play an acoustic guitar as to turn it up to 26.”

Martin, 6-foot-2 and athletic-looking, is trying to take it easy on the afternoon of the second Mayan concert. Sitting at the hotel suite’s long glass dining table, he talks eagerly about his favorite music, from Dylan to At the Drive-In, but he’s nursing a tender throat, so he speaks evenly, and he bowed out of some other interviews scheduled for the same day.

Learning to cope with the demands of popularity has been a crash course.

“Last year was very reactive--we couldn’t plan anything because we had no idea what to expect,” says Phil Harvey, the band’s U.K. manager. “We made our record and bang, we were No. 1 in the U.K. and getting releases in a lot of countries worldwide, and there was a lot of pressure on the band to be everywhere at the same time. And that was tough. But this year we’re a little more ready for it.”

Harvey isn’t a high-powered manager. He’s been Martin’s best friend since childhood, and the extent of his music business experience was promoting some club shows as a student at Oxford. When Coldplay gave him the job, he started reading a biography of U2 to learn what to do.

“This is what’s so extraordinary about it,” says Martin. “It’s just like these five blokes, four of us and then him, who just know what we like and we don’t know anything else. . . . We’re just kind of guessing our way through it and just trusting that at the end of the day, if we keep writing good songs, then we’ll be OK.”

*

Coldplay isn’t entirely a case of what you see is what you get. It might seem casual, but don’t get the idea it’s accidental.

Martin, the oldest of five children growing up in Devon, had the bug since he was 14, and he enrolled at London University primarily to find musical collaborators. He hooked up with Buckland and Berryman, and began writing and rehearsing intensively. Things jelled further when Champion joined, and the distinctive Coldplay voice began to emerge.

“I’m a great believer in cathartic music,” Martin says. “I don’t care what a song is, whether it’s depressing or uplifting, whether it’s Bill Withers’ ‘Lovely Day’ or the Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now,’ I just care if I love it. I love sad songs though, you know. Everybody does.”

On the strength of a self-financed EP, the band members began courting record label offers and signed with EMI’s Parlophone. After taking some more time to develop songs and rapport, they went into the studio for six agonizing months.

“There must have been six times where we just sat around and everyone was just staring at the floor,” Martin says. “It was not gonna get finished. . . . But we kept chipping away. I thought, ‘Well, if we put this much passion into it, someone’s got to like it. Something this painful can’t be a waste of time.”

True enough. The first single, “Shiver,” did well in the U.K., then “Yellow” entered the English chart at No. 4, and Coldplay was suddenly the discovery of the year.

In the U.S., the album came out in November.

“At the start it needed grass-roots, painstaking care,” says Roy Lott, president of Capitol. “What they’re doing is against the formula--it’s not Rage Against the Machine, Korn. . . . There was a good deal of resistance because it doesn’t play into the format.”

Nettwerk America got some play for “Yellow” in the Northwest, then L.A.’s influential KROQ-FM (106.7) threw it into the mix, and it took off from there. Lott brought the Coldplay campaign into Capitol’s high-powered machinery Jan. 1, after momentum reached critical mass.

All of which has left Martin and company a little dizzy but still game.

“What’s so gratifying is the fact that there’s a certain amount of work that your music can do still, in this age where you have to be at the right places and chat with the right people--that’s what we get told anyway,” says Martin.

“Yesterday on the bus I just thought, ‘I wish we could just sit in a little hole in Cuba or something and never go anywhere and just send records out.’

“But also I’m highly driven, so nothing’s too much of a challenge. Just ‘cause I love it, you know what I mean? And I hate someone saying. ‘Oh yeah, you’re good, but such and such is better.’ I don’t know why, but I have this incredible desire to be the best. Which is healthy in what we do.”