Dry your eyes now. You can’t say Coldplay didn’t give us ample warning. “We are only going to do 12 proper albums and that’s real,” the English rock band’s singer Chris Martin told Apple Music this week: a shock revelation that had music lovers feverishly counting on their fingers.
This music lover was, I confess, inconsolable. It means that after Moon Music lands today (October 4), we’re due for two more serves of their insufferable bombast and mewling, lasting until 2030. But haters gonna hate, as another popular stadium shaker (11 proper albums and counting) memorably surmised.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin, performing in Perth last November, says bands have a shelf life.Credit: Duncan Barnes
For Coldplay’s millions of fans, the news is much better. Martin’s bid to become rock’s Quentin Tarantino (nine proper movies down, one to go) makes all kinds of sense in a market that prefers your old stuff with increasing ardour, opting as years roll by for the “improper” likes of hits compilations and classic-album repackages.
Consider, as Martin did, the perennial touchstone of the Beatles. Looking back from here, their 11 or 13 albums – depending on what you consider proper – define a perfectly glorious arc: hardly flawless, but rendered whole and unassailable by the fact that they stopped making them.
The eternally Rolling Stones, not so much. Fans tend to favour the Brian Jones years, or the late ’60s/early ‘70s sprint from Beggars Banquet to Exile on Main St. But the Stones’ set lists are tellingly unconcerned today with anything much after album 14 – or maybe 16: there’s too much impropriety to count with those guys.
Of the other all-time king-hitter boy bands, Pink Floyd enjoyed a mostly stellar 11-album run up to and including The Wall, then rancour, derision and greatest-hits tours thereafter. Led Zeppelin peaked at six, those last three albums invariably ranked as OK or worse.
Eternally Rolling Stones: Ron Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards perform in Atlanta in June.Credit: Paul R. Giunta/Invision/AP
Fast forwarding to other man-gangs that Coldplay have cited as inspirational, only the Smiths managed to bow out with dignity after four albums. REM and U2 will be charitably remembered for 10 proper albums and a downward spiral of five footnotes. If Radiohead never make a 10th, fans can rest assured they’ve heard nothing but their best. Oasis managed only two before succumbing to turgid repetition.
On this evidence, Martin’s assertion that “quality control” fades around the dozen-album mark is generous to the point of clear-and-present peril for a band that’s taken twice or three times as long to get there as any of those named above. Which leads to the other stated reason for Coldplay’s sensible retirement plan. “I want to give the [other members] some of their life for themselves,” their leader magnanimously told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe: surely sensitive new age rock star’s code for: “Listen, I’ve had it up to here with this gig.”
It’s not just tour bus friction that makes a songwriter like Mark Knopfler decide to bury Dire Straits after six proper albums. He’s made 10 solo records since he parked that cumbersome juggernaut, plus a nimble array of soundtracks and collaborations unburdened by branded T-shirt zealots demanding he play Sultans of Swing for the zillionth time.
Making music “will always continue in some way”, Chris Martin stressed, leaving plenty of wriggle room for life beyond the brand he’s burnished for 25 years.
Consider this a cheeky plug for the inevitable solo albums that might, like Knopfler’s, sound weirdly reminiscent of his old band. Post-2030, he and Coldplay fans alike can also look forward to an open-ended phase of active nostalgia propelled by a rolling landslide of “improper” albums: the kind of canny marketing events that heave the Beatles up the charts every few
years to this day.
Start saving, too, for the mid-21st century anniversary reunion tours: one Stones-style stadium supernova every five years, each “how do they do it at their age?” benchmark teased as definitely/ maybe their last, and none compromised by the token disappointing single from the 13th Coldplay album that never was.
That’s if the brand makes it that far unscathed. Looking two albums and six years ahead is crazy brave in an age measured in TikTok moments and grim tidings about everything from the collapse of the festival circuit to the imminent victory of artificial intelligence.
Add to those unknowns the apparent reality that the jig is now well and truly up for guitar-stroking boy bands. Exceptions will always prove the rule: Melbourne’s King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released their 26th album in August. But at Coldplay’s end of town, it does appear that the Beatles’ circa ’63 rejection from Decca Records has at last come true. Guitar groups are on the way out.
In a market primed by cunning interview soundbites, Moon Music will be in the throes of a spectacular honeymoon as Coldplay kick off the next leg of their epic world tour in Melbourne at the end of this month. But in time, the same market will confirm the slow slide in album sales since their mid-2000s commercial peak. Promising two more just like it might end up being the biggest mistake of their brilliant career.
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