It’s a long time, a very, very long time, since I bought a Coldplay album. Has any band of the past 20 years been so consistently irritating? Oasis were aggressively annoying, which isn’t the same thing. I quite liked the first Coldplay album, particularly ‘Trouble’, and A Rush of Blood to the Head was a fine record, full of the sense of an ambitious young band finding out what they were capable of. After that, though, they made the fatal Faustian decision to become the biggest band in the world. Although I have made it my business to hear subsequent albums, partly out of curiosity and partly to confirm my prejudices, actual folding money has not been involved. Chris Martin’s marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow and their decision to start naming their children after fruit seemed to say it all. Bands don’t often return from such dark places as this.
Then I read somewhere that the ambient producer Jon Hopkins was on the new record. This was a good omen. Hopkins started out as Imogen Heap’s keyboard player and has worked a lot with Brian Eno, most notably on an improvised 2010 album, Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Opal). His real calling card, though, was a 2011 collaboration with the Scots folkie King Creosote, Diamond Mine, which was nominated for the Mercury and should have won. Creosote, real name Kenny Anderson, had recorded countless albums over the years, many of them apparently on the hoof with just an acoustic guitar for company. Diamond Mine was quite different, half a dozen bleak songs of the Western Isles bathed in ambient soundscapes. Hopkins’s contributions were not just sympathetic but beautiful, unexpected, transcendent, too. If I were Kenny Anderson, I’d never want to work with anyone else ever again.
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