More people should tell Chris Martin that he’s awful

It’s the right thing to do


Can you imagine an insult more potent than “your girlfriend fancies Chris Martin”? Chris Martin – the music teacher all the girls crushed on at school. Except when he took his year out to go and do ayahuasca in Peru, he never came back, and instead sold loads of anthemic stadium rock albums about relationships to millions of idiots across the world.

But does Chris Martin, insulated by stardom, cosseted by money, realise how awful he is?

Before you would have had to say no. You could not have expected Chris Martin to be aware of his virtuoso blandness. But things are changing. Beyoncé didn’t just steal the show from Coldplay at the Super Bowl the other day, she also let Chris in on something most of us have known since the beginning: Coldplay suck.

A preview of Martin’s upcoming interview in Rolling Stone reveals that Beyoncé had to turn down a collaboration with him because the song was “awful”.

Beyoncé let him down, Martin says, “in the sweetest possible way: She told me, ‘I really like you – but this is awful.’”

Imagine how many dreadful acoustic versions of The Scientist the world would have been spared if someone Martin and the boys from Devon had been told how awful they were from the beginning. The answer is likely somewhere in the millions.

David Bowie also once told Coldplay to do one. He turned down a potential collaboration with them because, according to their drummer, Will Champion, he said it was “not a very good song”. According to Martin, Bowie rang and told him “It’s not one of your best.” If Coldplay’s best goes something like para para paradise then God knows what something worse than that sounded like.

Bowie and Bey have set a good example to the rest of us here: tell Chris Martin he’s awful. Do not let Chris Martin forget Coldplay are awful.