Coldplay - is it all yellow or is it all beige?

Coldplay have released their first documentary film. It’s called A Head Full of Dreams and it charts the band’s rise from students in a Camden flat in 1996 to a mega-band rivalling U2 in both sales and near-religious fan adulation. Listen to Alan Corr on Coldplay above

So after the million-selling albums and tours, the "conscious uncoupling" from famous actresses, and the earnest sloganeering from front man Chris Martin, a film is a natural step for a band who have achieved so very much.

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But will this new rockumentary do anything to change hearts and minds about Coldplay, the most divisive band of the last 20 years?

They are clearly loved - they’ve sold 80 million albums and their last world tour was third only to U2 and the Rolling Stones in ticket sales. Last year they sold out Croke Park and left 82,000 people floating on air.

The young Coldplay: ready to take on the world

However, Coldplay are clearly unloved too. The band’s position as a kind of posh U2 irks a lot of people - especially those who reckon one U2 is quite enough already.

To their fans, Coldplay’s feel-good rock is a balm in troubled times. To others they are a bunch of do-gooders with a moribund reliance on music clichés.

For these people it is not all yellow; it is all beige.

And like U2, the case against Coldplay seems largely centred on their front man. Chris Martin too often behaves like a kids’ TV presenter, speaking fluent emoji.

To some people, Coldplay are the house band of the Home Counties. Where is their struggle and their pain, cry proto punk purists. Why didn’t we think of that first, wail the nevereneding parade of Coldplay clones.

They arrived fully formed 20 years ago as a kind of Radiohead for slow learners or, in Alan McGee’s deathless phrase, a bunch of "bed wetters", with a New Man Manifesto of a debut album called Parachutes. It sold three million copies.

The follow-up, A Rush of Blood to The Head was a magnificent 21st century hymn to alienation but then Coldplay, to use a recondite critical term, lost the plot - the bigger they became, the more majestic and ambitious their music had to become too.

They became the band who swept away rock music’s right to be obnoxious and ushered in a new era of trembling sincerity and inclusivity.

A lot has changed since 1999. That student flat in Camden would now cost about three grand a month and a similar sense of gentrification has changed rock music itself.

However, snubbed by Bowie and scolded by Brian Eno, Coldplay are very aware that they will never be cool.

One of the best scenes in A Head Full Of Dreams is the sight of Martin drawing up a kind of spreadsheet of the "Coldplay sound".

In a series of rapidly sketched diagrams and graphs he charts his band’s rise as a mix of R.E.M. and U2 ("R.E.U2", as he calls them) and reveals how the right "wooo-woo-ah" and a guest turn from Beyoncé can give a song the band’s patented pop appeal.

Martin, the former trendy vicar of Camden Town, certainly has a sense of humour and for all their designer existentialism and lack of outsider cred, it is clear that Coldplay do not care what the haters think.

And that’s pretty rock `n’ roll as far as I’m concerned.

Alan Corr @corralan

A Head Full of Dreams is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video right now. The album Coldplay: Live In Buenos Aires is released on December 7.

Coldplay - is it all yellow or is it all beige?

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