Coldplay are corny. We know it. They know it. Ever since the world first saw Chris Martin running on the beach in the “Yellow” video, Coldplay have been corny. Sometimes, that corniness takes the form of abashed self-deprecation, and sometimes it manifests as over-serious messianic-complex bullshit. Sometimes, it even looks like desperation, as when Coldplay glommed onto both Max Martin and BTS in their successful quest to land a #1 hit last year. At certain points in their history, though, Coldplay have turned that corniness to their advantage, to do things that no non-corny band could’ve ever accomplished. For instance: “Clocks.” A cool band could’ve never made “Clocks,” and that’s why “Clocks” stands as an eternal argument that coolness is overrated.
Let’s talk about “Clocks” for a minute. For my money, “Clocks” is the best song on Coldplay’s sophomore album A Rush Of Blood To The Head, which turns 20 years old today. For my money, “Clocks” is also the best thing that Coldplay have ever done. I say this even though I have no idea what “Clocks” is about. A trouble that can’t be named? A tiger waiting to be tamed? The tides that Chris Martin tried to swim against? Someone shooting an apple off of Chris Martin’s head? Whatever. It’s fine. Doesn’t matter. “Clocks” doesn’t seem to have any specific subject because it’s beyond specificity. It doesn’t even capture any individual feeling. Instead, it captures feeling itself, in all of its messy grandeur.
That tumbling piano? That thrumming bass? The way those drums hit, like a wrecking ball suddenly crashing through your wall? That rush of strings to the head? It’s almost too beautiful to analyze. It’s less of a song, more of a weather system. It’s the purple sky over the mountains at sunrise, so picturesque that it doesn’t seem real. For massive swaths of “Clocks,” Chris Martin just lets that falsetto soar over everything, sad and elated and strong and vulnerable and bittersweet and eternal. When Martin starts singing about home, home, where he wanted to go, his puffy-cloud lyrics somehow escape the bounds of middle-school poetry and tip over into the universal. The whole song sounds like U2 drunk on early-’00s big-room trance. It’s swollen and majestic and embarrassing and so, so pretty. When a song like “Clocks” comes along, there’s no point in resisting, in asking questions. You just have to submit, to let that motherfucker wash over you.
Coldplay were flirting with that kind of transcendence even before A Rush Of Blood To The Head. That “Yellow” video may have been corny, but it was corny in a charming and effective way, much like the song itself. “Yellow” was enough to push Coldplay out of the realm of drippy post-Radiohead British balladeers, the Travises and Starsailors and Feeders of the world, and into orbit. You can chart Coldplay’s ascent from the moment that they released their 2000 debut Parachutes. Just look at where Coldplay sat in the lineups of three Glastonbury festivals. 1999: Before Parachutes comes out, Coldplay are in something called the New Tent — presumably one of those areas that revellers tromp through when they’re looking for a good place to light a bonfire or wave one of those banners. 2000: Parachutes looms, and Coldplay are a third of the way up the bill on the Other Stage, playing before Death In Vegas and Elastica and Wannadies and David Gray. (Meanwhile, Travis are headlining the whole damn thing.) 2002: Coldplay headline the Pyramid Stage, the biggest stage on the biggest music festival in the world. They’re one album into their career, and they have already found something like immortality.
Coldplay weren’t supposed to be at Glastonbury in 2002. They were last-second replacements for the Strokes, who’d bailed on the festival a couple of weeks beforehand. It’s a bit like Pulp filling in for the just-broken-up Stone Roses in…
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