Chris Martin
64 quotes
Biography
Christopher Anthony John Martin is an English singer, songwriter and music producer. He is best known as the vocalist, pianist and co-founder of the rock band Coldplay, which he formed with Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman and Will Champion, at University College London.
"I definitely believe in God. How can you look at anything and not be over-whelmed by the miraculousness of it?"
"I think girls are amazing but I also feel really guilty about doing stuff with someone that you don't really like. I don't believe there is such a thing as casual sex. Someone always gets hurt and I hate that feeling. One thing about girls is that I get scared. I get scared of my feelings being in the hands of another person, I know that feeling of waiting for a girl to call. That's scary."
"I know I'm going to get shit for saying this, but yeah, I don't want to be too happy. To write I have to feel slightly sorry for myself. You have to be in a slightly self-obsessed state of mind to sit at a piano for six hours and not worry about meeting someone for a date. My best songs come when I have that feeling that I've left the party early. And the other reason our songs are all about struggling and worrying and being beleaguered is my dad. He's a terrible worrier. He's always after the next thing. And I am too. Luckily the other members are more relaxed. Three other members like me and we'd go nuts."
"Radiohead gave me hope. They were the band who gave me permission. I'm a public schoolboy from Devon and I'm not supposed to be in a band. Well, they proved I could. I thought, I'm a bit like them. Jonny was OK because he's northern and so is Guy."
"My mum always said to me she doesn't believe in sleeping with people before marriage. She's not being prissy. She's very rock 'n' roll--it means doing what you feel and damn everyone else--and she reckons waiting and committing leads to great sex. I didn't agree entirely, but I haven't slept with many people. I didn't lose my virginity until two years ago. If I was good with women I'd go and enjoy it. But also I'm obsessed with the band, so I refuse to commit to a relationship... I'm an ambitious little tosser."
"It was so terrifying, the plane was all over the place. Once a year, for a week, all this dust blows over from the Sahara Desert, you could not see a thing, I couldn't see the ground and as it turns out, nor could the pilot. I found out we were about 200 metres up. The plane dropped off violently to the right then way over to the left, it was lurching all over. But somehow the pilot pulled it off and landed. I don't know how he did it, I was convinced he wasn't going to. Did the pilot know Chris Martin was on board? I don't think he gave a flying f**k. My mind was racing and I thought, 'My daughter will have to get a stepdad.' I also thought, "I've written a will. The band have finished the album but they know how I want to finish certain songs.""
"It’s hard to perfect a happy song. Pharrell managed it. Stevie Wonder managed it. Bill Withers managed it. I haven’t managed it yet."
"The closest I got was in 1997. I was on a train; I’d just been to Devon to get braces fitted. I felt so self-conscious, I was like: ‘Shit, what am I going to do? I’m 19 and I’ve got braces.’ Then the train stopped at Castle Cary, and everybody from Glastonbury got on. And I just melted in the corner. [laughs] Did they all seem cool? They seemed so cool! I was just like: ‘Shit, how do you get that cool?’ So that was my closest experience to Glastonbury; being on a train and feeling like the nerdiest of nerds, because my mum had told me to get my wonky teeth fixed."
"They grow cheap tomatoes in Ghana, but I saw market stalls stacked high with cheap tinned tomatoes shipped in from Italy. If Ghana tries to export to Italy they are whacked with tariffs. It doesn't make any sense. We are making money out of these people and they can't afford to send their kids to school. We've got to keep banging on about fair trade. If people knew what misery these trade laws created they would be shocked."
"Being nice is a lot easier when you're loaded. Of course I can be a bastard, but it doesn't make me feel as good as not being one. What I'm saying is, sometimes people think you're nicer than you are just because you've got loads of money and you can pay for things."
"The whole rock star myth, which is 40 years old and basically nonsense, has nothing to do with being a rock star. Everybody gets trashed and breaks things. By that standard, plumbers and heating engineers are just as rock 'n' roll as rock stars."
"Those have been the two biggest challenges of my life: trying to follow Radiohead, and trying to follow Brad Pitt."
"Coldplay is for people with great taste, intelligence, incredible good lookingness, talent, ability, success, grabbing of life. Coldplay's for people who know what life's about. They're always entertaining. Delightful to talk to. Sweet, charming, incredibly good in bed. Virile. They have incredible success with girls, or boys, or both. They're generally just the world's best citizens. Maybe I'm biased, but I'm definitely right."
"To be a frontman you have to be half very driven and half a total knob. I like to think I'm both."
"I think as people listen to the album more it'll become its own thing more, but it'll also become apparent how much we've plagiarised. To me, really, at the end of our album we should've had a bibliography."
"One day in Haiti I was talking to a farmer. I said, 'I don't have any solution to these problems.' He said, 'Of course you don't! You're a singer.' He was right. Music is what I live for - and as Coldplay, our main job is to make the best music we can. But I hope that in our small way we can do something to raise awareness."
"Life is beautiful in all its colors, even the darker ones, they’re here for a reason."
"The thing I really believe deep down is that everybody has a gift for something. Our job as adults is to make sure all children have the opportunity to find their gift."
"I love him, I really do. How much? Well, you know Leningrad in Russia. They should name it Lennongrad in honour of him."
"There’s an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where they get the text of an obituary wrong, and instead of saying “beloved aunt,” it says “beloved cunt.” And I always think that would kind of sum up the two sides of my life, the two sides of the coin. I’d like that."
"She can turn anything into gold with that voice, here's the thing: if you speak to a good singing teacher about great opera singers, they will talk about consistency of tone. Or there's a book by Alfred Tomatis about why some people like certain people's voices and other people hate them, like Bob Dylan or me or whoever, some people say, 'Oh, I hate that voice', so there's a thing about people's frequency responses, what they are pleased by. Rihanna has this thick tone, so it's very hard to annoy anybody."
"I’m never going to be as adept lyrically as Jay Z or Morrissey."
"Music comes from a place we don't know, it sort of comes through the fingers and toes."
"Some people misconstrue our band just to be just a commercial venture, they question the soulfulness of Coldplay because we’ve done okay. Maybe it’s because I’m English, but in terms of how people perceive us I only pick up on the negative side of it. I always feel like the big bad outside world just fucking hates us."
"What changed for me was – I don’t want to go through life being scared of it, being scared of love, being scared of rejection, being scared of failure."