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TWENTY years ago, Chris Martin, the frontman of British supergroup Coldplay, said their goal was to take over from Irish supergroup U2.
“Our goal is to take over from U2. I don’t mean ‘take over’ in a commercial or careerist sense, but in writing songs that move people in a big way,” he said in 2005.
It’s probably fair to say that two decades later, Chris and his Coldplay crew have reached those heights as they are now widely considered the biggest musical group in the world today.
Chris, who has a net worth of between US$160 and US$170 million, is now a mega post superstar and his life has undergone a massive transformation that he is barely recognisable as the boy who grew up in Devon, England.
During his youthful days, Chris even used to visit Zimbabwe, where his mother Alison is originally from.
Chris once described Zimbabwe as “a small paradise on Earth.”
He claimed the country’s natural beauty was something out of The Lord of the Rings.
Maybe, that explains why he remains connected to Zimbabwe through roping the likes of Shone and the Australia-based Adrian Dzvuke, on Coldplay’s world tours.Adrian played before 67,000 fans in Perth while Shone became the first Zimbabwean musician to play before a combined audience of more than half-a-million people, spread over five shows, in India.
He was part of Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour. The mega shows attracted a combined audience of about 580,000.Chris has come a long way.
The Coldplay lead singer has toured the world, married (and divorced) a Hollywood actress, won a whole host of prestigious music awards and been part of some pretty significant events in musical and cultural history.
His journey started 48 years ago in the county of Devon, where his love of Exeter City Football Club and the rest of his home county, truly began.
With a family business in caravans and motorhomes, as well as many links to the Conservative politics, the Coldplay singer’s life could have taken quite a different turn.
Chris is the eldest of five children.
His mother, Alison, is originally from Zimbabwe. She worked as a music teacher while his father, Anthony is from Exeter. His grandfather, John Besley Martin, CBE, was a High Sheriff and also the 1968 Mayor of Exeter.
In 2011, his parents divorced and Chris’ friends said he has found it “incredibly difficult emotionally” after his mum Alison decided to leave the family home. His father started a new relationship and put the family’s £1.25million home on the market.
The family moved there in 1978 when Chris – eldest of five kids —was just a baby. A source said: “Chris has always been extremely close to his father, while some of his sisters have had very strong relationships with their mother.
“But watching his parents split has been heartbreaking for him, and he’s desperate to stay close and in regular contact with both of them.
“One of the most upsetting aspects of the break-up has been their decision to sell their family home. He was less than one year old when his parents moved in, and the house holds a lot of memories for him.”His mum’s devout religious beliefs may have contributed to the break-up.
Chris opened up about how difficult it was growing up in a strict religious home and how he was still struggling to deal with it as an adult.
He reflected on his evangelical upbringing in southwest England, saying that although he has moved away from the religion, it still affects him.
“I am having such a hard time in my life right now. And part of dealing with that is going back to look at all that stuff,” Martin told Howard Stern on his SiriusXM show.
“Any method of coping is a strength when you develop it, but later in your life it might not necessarily serve you anymore.” In 2019 he told The Sunday Times’ Culture magazine that he was bullied when he attended Sherborne School, an independent boarding school in Dorset, for being “closed minded” and a “zealot.”
“I struggled, like a lot of young teenagers … 13 to 15. I had weird world-views that didn’t help. I was closed-minded, which is easy to make fun of, but I am happy, because it lit the fire.”
He told Rolling Stone magazine in 2008 that because of his religion he grew up with a “black and white” view of the world.
“I grew up with the prospect of heaven and hell looming ever large,” he said. “It was drilled in: These things are wrong. It was black and white, the way it still is for millions of right-wing Christians in the middle of America.’
He added that his religious upbringing made him weary of performing certain songs. “I spent a year thinking I would be punished if I sang ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ by the Rolling Stones.
“When I was about 14, the first band I was in wanted to play ‘’Black Magic Woman,’ and I was like, ‘I can’t sing that, because I will get bad karma.’ As a kid, you don’t know any better.”
Chris would later also divorce his wife, Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow in 2014. Their daughter Apple was born in 2004 and their son, Moses, arrived two years later.
All four members of Chris’ band are among the UK’s richest musicians.
In contrast to other titans of rock, Chris’ childhood seems to have had little visible angst. After prep school in Exeter, he boarded at Sherborne.
He was president of a Sting fan club and featured in school bands that played Pet Shop Boys-esque pop and Billy Joel-style honky-tonk piano. After school, he went to University College London to read ancient world studies and got a first.
Chris was a virgin until he was 22, and in the early days of Coldplay allegedly pursued fellow pop stars Nelly Furtado and Natalie Imbruglia, with unconfirmed rates of success.
He rarely drinks and doesn’t smoke or take drugs because he doesn’t like being out of control.
Fame and money were interesting to him only in the sense that they served the bigger project: becoming the biggest band in the world.- H-Metro Reporter/DevonLive/Guardian
Mathew Masinge
Online Reporter