One of the most commercially successful bands of all time, Coldplay has captivated millions of fans over the past two decades with its soaring, theatrical melodies and powerful live performances. If you’ve never taken the time to familiarize yourself with the band, here’s everything you need to know to hold your own in conversation.
The band consists of Chris Martin and the three mute offspring that he birthed asexually: Although Martin never gave his self-generated bandmates names other than the six-digit serial numbers on their respective incubation chambers, they are commonly referred to by fans as Boppo (drums), Captain Penis (lead guitar), and Slobbering Jeff (bass guitar). All three have been chemically castrated so as not to pose a danger at live performances.
The band passionately advocates for environmental causes and once recorded a song for deer to let them know not to get hit by cars: The song, “Just Stay In The Woods, You Idiots,” made history as the first song written for a deer audience to ever top the U.K. Singles Chart.
Coldplay is the third band to come from Europe, following in the footsteps of The Beatles and Godsmack: The band has done more than just about anyone over the past 20 years to refute the widely held stereotype of Europe as a musical and cultural wasteland.
Chris Martin met his ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow when she was working as a stagehand on Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head Tour: The couple later divorced in 2016, when Paltrow went to work on stage lighting for Billy Joel.
In the 2005 hit comedy The 40-Year Old Virgin, there’s a memorable scene wherein two characters, played by Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen, trade insults while playing video games, improvising around the repeated line “Do you know how I know you’re gay?” and one of the first answers to this query is, “Because you like Coldplay,” despite the fact that none of the band members are openly homosexual and none of their material explores LGBTQI themes, and one can gather that audiences likely found this ad lib humorous due to Coldplay’s propensity for creating sensitive, emotional music—or “wuss rock,” as it is colloquially known—that is perceived as incongruous with classic societal notions of masculinity, and also because the band boasts a predominately female fan base and is thus not generally categorized as an act with obvious appeal to heteronormative male consumers, and hence, it is likely that audiences, upon hearing a stereotypical twentysomething male associate a popular band with homosexuality, weren’t exactly laughing at homosexuality itself (although some very well may have been—prejudices vary from person to person), but rather the fragile masculinity embodied by the character delineating certain things in the zeitgeist as “gay” or “straight,” although the fact that this line was improvised opens up even more possibilities for meaning and intent, which will be discussed extensively here at a later date: Coldplay is a very popular band that people sometimes reference in conversation.
