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18:04 · 2,977 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The scale first: eight albums and over 100 million records sold worldwide, which is the context for treating any decline as a decline rather than a failure.
▶ 00:00:00
- The turn is dated to the fourth album, after which sales, awards and both critic and user scores all fell together.
▶ 00:00:43
- They were signed almost immediately, with Parlophone offering a five-album contract straight out of their final exams, followed by a Glastonbury slot.
▶ 00:01:23
- For the second album they wrote over 20 songs and then delayed it, judging too many of them to be material that could have sat on the debut, cutting down to ten.
▶ 00:02:42
- Clocks was a late addition that was nearly held back for the third record, and it did for that album what Yellow had done for the first.
▶ 00:03:06
- The third album nearly broke them: close to 60 songs written, most of the demos scrapped, the record re-recorded several times, and a six-month delay that moved the label's share price.
▶ 00:04:01
- The diagnosis of X&Y is that it sounded exactly like what everyone expected, a quality record that surprised nobody, with the evolution too slight to register.
▶ 00:05:28
- Brian Eno's contribution was method rather than sound. He split the band into alternating writing pairs and sent Chris Martin home for weeks to see what the others produced without him.
▶ 00:06:07
- Viva la Vida also changed the vocal identity, with Martin sitting lower in his register instead of reaching for falsetto, and his voice buried in reverb on the hidden track.
▶ 00:07:22
- The closing argument is not that they went wrong but that at every turn another band was doing the same thing slightly better, so the audience moved and the band kept trying to follow it.
▶ 00:15:15