i typed this myself, so please ask me before you borrow it! thankies

No one said you had to be a great guitar player to be in a great band. Just ask Coldplay guitarist Jonny Buckland, whose group played their first-ever gig in late 1998. Two and a half years later, much to the bewilderment of the band's four barely twenty-something members, Coldplay took their UK homeland by storm with a melodic #1 debut album, Parachutes; and numerous nominations for prestigious awards. At the moment, the guys are fast becoming America's great white pop-rock hope, despite being British. Even crazier is that little of their success can truly be attributed to ace guitar playing, yet guitar sounds are integral to Coldplay's intoxicating vibe.

The band formed when its members were students at University College London; none of them were studying music. Coldplay's mass appeal did not stem from technical prowess. Instead, the self-taught group revealed an unusual ability to draw emotions out of simple vocal melodies and guitar constructs, with a tendency toward minor chords.

Coldplay's sound began when Buckland and lead singer/guitarist Chris Martin started playing guitars in their bedrooms. Soon the band's understated and lonely sound began to unfold naturally as the guys collectively wrote songs on keyboards and guitars. "When we write songs, we all kind of do our own bits, and then tell each other what we think of the others," explains Buckland, whose favorite guitar is a Fender Tele. "We generally start with Chris, who brings in a melody. Then we'll just take it from there and look at how its going to go."

Buckland is the first to admit that there is a severe lack of formal musical training in Coldplay. In fact, Will Champion came to the band with a love of playing guitar, but since they already had two guitarists, he settled for playing drums, a challenge he had undertaken only once the band had booked their first live gig.

A good guitar player, Martin is equally interested in singing and playing keyboards. Still, he's adept at coming up with the unusual tunings that define Coldplay's sad and deep sound. It's not uncommon to hear simple acoustic strumming in a Coldplay song like "Spies" or "Everything's Not Lost" prior to an electric guitar coming in to enhance and guide the song. It's not about what they're playing, it's about how they play it; the key word seems to be "tenderness."

Onstage, Martin complements that tenderness with a Takamine acoustic, while Buckland sports one of two Fender Telecasters, "one of which in fact is Will's, but I've kind of had it on permanent loan." Sometimes he brings in a Fender Jaguar to add textures, and a Jazzmaster as a mood enhancer, but that's been only in the last year or so. "I got myself a Jaguar about a year ago and I just liked it," Buckland says. "Then Chris bought himself the Jazzmaster that he didn't really use, so I did. They're just completely different to play, so you end up playing different things on them to create sounds. I find it good to have different guitars that inspire you in different ways."

Buckland was 11 when he picked up his first guitar. While growing up with his family in North Wales, he remembers his dad listening to great players like Clapton and Hendrix. "That's about when I first started playing my brother's guitar. At first I suppose I played a few times a week. As you get better, it gets more interesting, and so you want to plat it more and more, and then it's just all the time. One of the first things I was trying to work out was the Happy Monday's 'Kinky Afro.'"

Soon he came to admire groups like My Bloody Valentine and the Stone Roses. "The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays were just a lot cooler than anything I'd ever heard before," Buckland says. "It just seemed like they were having a good time making great songs." Today, he still considers Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), Johnny Marr (The Smiths), and Joey Santiago (The Pixies) as the most important players of his time.

The guitarists' attitudes toward their own playing illustrate that Coldplay is more about going with the flow than precise technique and composition. "I just add something different to everyone else," states Buckland. "I might have a different take on the melody, or a different melody. Or I'm there just to feel it out, or bring in a new texture, or to add something else. Whatever it takes."

So what about the unusual tunings that define songs like "Yellow" and "Shiver"? "Yeah, Chris does it. I just battle through it; I don't use a lot of open tunings like Chris. They're just stuff he's made up. They're not that open, although there's an occasional Open G. He just sort of puts some shapes in, then opens the strings to how he wants them to sound with the rest of the song. 'Yellow' is a really funny tuning: E-A-B-G-B-Eb [low to high]. I think it was the one he used for 'Shiver' as well."

Martin, Buckland, Champion, and Guy Berryman (bass) set out to make Parachutes sound as live as possible. They chose a stripped-down recording setup centered around two Fender Twins from the early '70s. Explains Buckland: "Because we wanted to get a live-sounding record when we went into the studio, we used all the stuff that we'd written and put it together on."

So how important is the guitar to Coldplay's creative process? "Quite important," Buckland says, "because it'll change what I write. What sounds good on one guitar might not sound good on another. I sort of tend to start on an acoustic guitar and ten move on to an electric, because I think the sound is as important as the part when you play an electric guitar."

to the articles/interviews page

Email me here.