COLDPLAY – ‘WE SCRAPPED FOUR ALBUMS’

As the band settle down to work on their third record Chris Martin tells NME.COM they’ve started out by throwing away over 40 songs…

COLDPLAY have scrapped over 40 songs as they start work on their third album.

In an exclusive NME.COM interview, Chris Martin said that the band are in and out of the studio, writing and recording material that could feature on the follow-up to ‘A Rush Of Blood To The Head’. Not due before the end of 2004, it’ll be one of the most anticipated British releases in years.

Martin said that while in a recent recording session in the US, the band embarked on a little “constructive destruction”, scrapping 42 songs from their back catalogue that they don’t think will make the cut.

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“So far all we’ve achieved is managing to scrap 42 songs. I regard that as constructive destruction,” Martin said. “But numbers are insignificant. You could say ‘I’ve written 12 songs’ and they’re all rubbish, or you could say you’ve written one song and it could be ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. I’m glamorising it, but we were just in Chicago and we scrapped a lot of songs.”

The group have been playing a handful of new songs live; working titles include ‘Gravity’, ‘Poor Me’, ‘Moses’ and ‘World Turns Upside Down’. It’s unclear if any of these will make it to the final record. When the band played new songs on the ‘Parachutes’ tour, most of those were relegated to B-sides when ‘A Rush Of Blood…’ was finally released.

Martin said that a typical day in the studio at this early stage is “hectic and emotional”, and that Coldplay are still struggling with what they consider quality.

“We want to record and record and record,” he continued. “We’ve already started. We spend half of the night writing. The great thing about flying back from America is that you’re up all night and you can just work. It strikes me the more fame and success you get, the more you realise that the only thing that’s really worth anything is the thing that made you want to get famous and successful in the first place. And that is writing tunes. It’s not about hanging out with Jay-Z. Although he is cool. That’s not the answer, the answer is putting down your favourite new song or being with the people you love the most. It’s not about the bling bling aspect. We’ve got some tunes man, let me tell you that!”

The full interview with Chris Martin is published in the NME Big Book, which is out nationwide in the UK this week. As well as more with Coldplay, the end of year magazine features the ultimate review of 2003, interviews with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, [/a], [a]

and The Strokes and features on [/a] and [a] amongst many others.

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Coldplay’s ‘Live 2003’ DVD/CD is released next Monday (November 10).

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