So. Farewell then, Coldplay. Or at least, eventually. Frontman Chris Martin has shocked-slash-delighted the world depending on your viewpoint with the announcement on Jo Whiley’s BBC Two radio show that the band will release no more new music after 2025, which may not quite rival Cher for the longest musical goodbye but does seem to drag it out rather.
“Well I know I can tell you, our last proper record will come out in 2025 and after that, I think we will only tour,” Martin told Whiley.
“Maybe we’ll do some collaborative things, but the Coldplay catalogue, as it were, finishes then.”
Which rather raises the question of what they’ve still got up their double-layered long-short sleeves. If their last, grandly titled album Music of the Spheres is anything to go by then frankly I’m not sure the world can take it.
A brazenly commercial bucket of bombast that featured Selena Gomez (the fifth most followed person on Instagram) and the K-Pop megastars BTS, it was so overblown and desperate for attention that they even premiered the lead single, Higher Power (really) by beaming it into the International Space Station. It was just SO over the top. What could they possibly do next?
Perhaps having unintentionally handed the baton of anodyne stadium pop-rock over to Ed Sheeran a few years earlier than they meant to, they’ve simply decided that they can no longer be arsed. I do think that’s fair enough.
It can’t be anything like as much fun to fiddle around trying to make this stuff than it is yelling it at a vast and inexplicably adoring crowd, as the band seems likely to do at their six sold-out Wembley gigs next year (a month after Sheeran’s mere five nights in the same venue).
Perhaps Martin has just realised that he needn’t sweat over yet another page of banal lyrics (he has admitted himself that he’s not much of a lyricist) when thousands of people are delighted to bellow those he’s already written back at him until the end of time.
Maybe if we just let them know that it’s OK, they’ll just leave it at that?
