With their lead singer Chris Martin (23) suffering from shitty-vocal-chorditis, the rest of the members (Jonny Buckland (lead guitarist, 23), Guy Berryman (bass player, 22) and Will Champion (drummer, 23)) of U.K. pop sensations Coldplay are picking up his slack. However, they exact their revenge by playing longer sets, containing up to six new songs every night, explains Buckland in a noontime chat with ChartAttack's M&M.

"We do his share of the press, but we also tell him to shut up all the time," says Buckland. "That's all we can do for him." We've been worried that their upcoming Toronto and Montreal gigs that had been re-scheduled from February would suffer as Martin is under strict orders not to speak to anyone. Implementing this scheme has allowed "his voice to get a lot stronger than it was. It's getting a lot better, but he has to be careful. We don't want to cut this tour short again."

Coldplay did a handful of dates on what was going to be the most anticipated North American tour in the winter. Those in Vancouver who witnessed their North American debut raved about the gig. However, their intense tour schedule caused them to come up ill shortly after completing a series of gigs in Australia as part of the Big Day Out summer festival.

Another fear that M&M expressed to Buckland was that Coldplay would only play short sets every night to prevent long term damage to Martin's vocal chords. "We probably do longer sets," he says, "We've organized the tour so that there's no real pressure on Chris' voice. We're not doing any more than three gigs in a row. Mostly it's two or one. After the last one [tour] we just figured that this would be a five or six week tour and we're not going to get through it if we don't do it like this."

Filling out their set is new material that they worked on after canceling their North American tour. "We're going to play five or six new songs. If we just played Parachutes it would just be a 40-minute set. So it's either play really old songs or play these new songs. We want to be moving on and appear to be moving on. We don't want to be a static band resting on that album." Buckland remarked after this jaunt Coldplay are heading into the studio for a week at the start of July to begin the recording process.

The advantage of only performing a few nights in a row is that they have more down time to explore the cities they're in. Coldplay aren't exactly acting like tourists, but unlike most touring bands, they're seeing parts of the country. "It's not really a vacation, but more than just going inside the venue and then going inside another. They all look pretty much the same anywhere in the world — it's quite good to get around the cities a bit."

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