They’re about to headline Glastonbury, and it’s been a long, joyous road for the multi-million-selling London group. Here’s Coldplay’s story so far in photographs, from 1999 to 2016.
Onstage at the Bull & Gate, 1999. The beloved north London venue closed in 2013 to become a gastropub. In an email to local paper The Camden New Journal, Chris Martin wrote: “In January 1999 promoter Simon Williams and the great people of the Bull let us bang out five songs in 20 minutes. It got us our first NME review and changed our lives forever. We’ll always be grateful.”
NME cover, 2000. Coldplay were on the NME Awards tour in 2000 and graced the magazine’s cover that same year. Interviewed about the tour, a fidgety, slightly awkward Chris said: “We adopted a new philosophy for this tour… We used to apologise a lot on stage and be a bit humble or miserable or whatever, but we’ve gone at it with a bit of verve this time.”
The Brit Awards, 2001. The London group picked up the Best Album Award at the Brits in 2001, ushering them into the big time.
Onstage at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, 2003. This performance, filled with songs from second album ‘A Rush of Blood To The Head’, was turned into a live CD/DVD. NME writer Mark Beaumont gave the CD/DVD a 9/10 review and said it found Coldplay at the “blinking pupae stage of emerging into the stadium league without the circus trappings of the stadium show”.
Onstage for ‘Mylo Xyloto’ tour, 2012: The band adopted a day-glo look as they toured their fifth album, ‘Mylo Xyloto’. Punters were given glowing wristbands that changed colour in time with the music – and apparently cost Coldplay 4.22 million quid. Ouch!
