Apr 30th 2008 The Wisdom of Chris Martin, part 1
As a Great Prophet, Chris Martin seems unable to open his mouth without some nugget of Holy Wisdom tumbling out. In this series, we will look at just a few of the gems that The Church of Chris Martin have taken as their Proverbs.
On U2 - “I just want to make something I can put next to ‘The Joshua Tree’ and feel proud.”
“To me, they’re like Mount Everest or the Taj Mahal or the Sears Tower. They’re a great, great thing. And if you’re going to do something, you may as well aim to do something great. I’m not saying we’re better than them. I’m just saying if you’re going to aim for anything, you might as well aim for the best.”
“U2 can be beaten. For me it’s no different from the film Rocky. You study your opponent. And I regard them as opponents.”
On Radiohead - “I think if you imagine Radiohead going through a jungle clearing a path, then we’re the ones who are probably just criminally paving it. I always see Radiohead as the braver people.”
On Fame - “After being with Gwyn I’ve realised everyone is human. We really build people up as if they are from Mars. Hollywood seems as accessible as Mars.When I started meeting celebrities it was depressing because you can’t believe in the mythology of people any more.”
On the success of his band - ”I gleaned that it doesn’t matter if you’re in one of the biggest bands in the world, it doesn’t mean you’re very good.”
“Let me be clear: We’re an incredibly arrogant band and we believe in ourselves above all others. But we also acknowledge that there’s no way we can take credit for where we are. I didn’t design my larynx, if you want to go right back to Square 1. … So we work very hard to capitalize and validate what we’ve been given. Because we have been given it. It’s not graciousness, it’s just honesty.”
“It’s very depressing, but it’s very healthy. We always have this bubbling level of vitriol. Maybe it’s something to do with my haircut. Maybe we’re too feminine for the masculine and too masculine for the feminine. That’s the great thing about people who hate us. We can suck out the energy and make it into something positive.”
On his balls - “I went through a weird patch, starting when I was about sixteen to twenty-two, of getting God and religion and superstition and judgment all confused. I think a lot of our music comes out of that. I definitely believe in God. How can you look at anything and not be overwhelmed by the miraculousness of it? Everything from that carpet to your nose to my balls is amazing. In fact, my balls are a particular miracle.”
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The four group members, their wives and their many children, gathered at Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow’s London pad for an afternoon of revelry, and a break from their punishing schedule of marketing the new LP. They enjoyed a few ales and partook of the traditional St. George’s Day festivities. These included -
Re-watching the 1966 World Cup Final - Everyone must say “They think it’s all over - it is now!” at the appropriate moment. Extra kudos can be earned by wearing a Bobby Charlton comb-over wig, or by going to a foreign country en masse, getting blind drunk and fighting with the locals.
A Minute’s Silence for the Queen - The Queen is a German enchantress who has somehow managed to bewitch the English into believing that she is somehow more than human. They not only give her money, but even the lives of their sons. She represents nothing that is progressive, equal or sane, yet grown Englishmen will still weep over their Christmas dinners as she reads a speech written by someone else, without any emotion or theatrical flair.
When the fun was over, what else was there to do but to all sit down to a meal of traditional English food - a macrobiotic, organic Chicken Tikka Masala, specially created by their private chef, Farouk Sanddu.
BEHOLD - THE LAMB OF GOD!
He is talking about the Sacred Feminine here. Like in Da Vinci’s Code. Chris Martin is not afrain of his femine side, saying he loves his wife and being all melodramatic, but he’s masculine as well, getting mad and kicking off at photographers and that.
“We have tested it in every possible circumstance, and so far no-one has been able to make it past the second verse without blubbering,” a top expert said. “We’ve played it to everything from monkeys to shrews - if it has a tear duct, it’ll wail. In fact, we didn’t even know that fruit-flies could cry, and they seem to be secreting a greyish liquid through their carapaces in a grotesque pastiche of their emotional human masters.”
“We even played it to a Nazi. He broke at the end of the chorus, whimpering like a prick. Only one other person that we tested managed to suppress their lamentations any further into the song - the “popular” “singer” and world-renouned rhyming slang, James Blunt.”
But even its being an officially-sanctioned supernatural religious phenomenon hasn’t stopped some people thinking of ways that it could be put to more practical use. Expect Coldplay to allow the track to be used in anger management sessions (allowing the release of pent-up emotions), rape alarms (not only immobilising the attacker with bitter sobs, but probably ruining his erection too), and for teachers, the song having been proven to take a class of 30 working-class children from an intense hysteria to a pathetic anguished whimpering in just under 42 seconds.
Then, the USA went to war, and so did The Cold Mountain Singers. They returned to performing upon their return, but they were different men, older and wiser, with a new found urgency to spread their message. Their repertoire had changed too, to incorporate original compositions.
It looks like the Church of Chris Martin’s daring critique of the state has finally come to the attention of “the Powers that Be”.
So what can we make of this? Is New York magazine so chronically short of ideas that it needs to mock an honest religion? And if you want a religion to ridicule, what’s wrong with Scientology?