Amsterdam // Coldplay
Don’t laugh. Please don’t laugh. Oh, for the love of everything good and holy and Julian Casablancas, please don’t laugh. Or at least save your snickers and sneers for after you’ve finished this article.Yes, I was an avid Coldplay fan. I was even in love with the bassist, Guy Berryman. When I was about ten. So much so that I’d gone to one of their A Rush of Blood to the Head concerts and cried. Yes, cried during a particularly moving rendition of ‘Yellow’. Openly gushed the Niagara Falls out from my eyeballs.
In my defense, however, I got into them at a time when Coldplay were considered to be cool! I grew up in America, you know, a barren wasteland where we are deprived of truly ‘cool’ things; everything that starts off as cool in Britain is not cool in America until approximately five years later. So yes, I was a massive Coldplay fan at the time, embarrassingly enough; but I do owe them a massive debt.
It was Coldplay, at the age of ten, that led me to an interest in modern alternative music hailing from England, which then opened a gateway into a myriad of British bands I’d later listen to and obsess over – from the early rock roots of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who, to modern alternative rock giants such as Arctic Monkeys, The Libertines, and Radiohead. If it weren’t for an obsession with English alternative rock music at a time when A Rush of Blood to the Head was dominating the globe, I’m sure my iTunes library today would look rather different.