The one band Bono said rose faster than anyone else
The entire goal of U2 was for Bono to guide the band throughout places that rock and roll had never been before.
They were entirely reverent of the classics, but when you look at what they were doing on Rattle and Hum, they were trying to both pay tribute to the past and pave the way for the future, often with very mixed results and Bono looking the most self-interested frontman of all time. That might not have been entirely true when looking at the music itself, but the singer did have to give kudos when he saw bands that were breaking America faster than anyone else ever could.
Because you have to understand how hard it is to crack the US for any British act. Most people would be happy to have made it in their home country, but when you look at the way that U2 went about making their way to the States from their native Ireland, they were going to do everything they could to celebrate their American influences before the country embraced them in the late 1980s.
So if you had to conform to what the US wanted out of rock and roll bands, it’s not exactly a shock when the Britpop boom wasn’t as much of a big deal on the other side of the Atlantic. Fans simply weren’t ready for bands like Oasis when they first came over, and even though the other bands of their ilk were being treated like musical gods every single time they played, it wasn’t until Coldplay came around that people found a much more gentle approach to what Britpop was supposed to be.
It’s stretching to really call Coldplay pure Britpop, but when you listen to ‘Yellow’, they did seem to take the laid-back approach that they heard out of bands like Travis and make it even more pop-friendly on their own. They did have a few more eclectic influences like Jeff Buckley, but their crossover appeal was always what interested Bono when he first heard them in the early 2000s.
U2 were already on their second or third wave of popularity, but given how long they had worked to establish themselves, Bono was floored at how quickly Coldplay managed to climb up the ladder, saying, “Coldplay are just extraordinary. They’ve pulled off in two albums what no other UK band has done in 20 years. And you have some kind of moral compass working there – which makes it a spectator sport, because you want to see how he’s going to negotiate his celebrity, and his songwriting prowess, and his sense that not everything is right with the world.”
That said, the band’s evolution over the past few years does have the same kind of trajectory as U2, if only in the fact that both of them got pretty annoying somewhere along the line. You could tell that Chris Martin still wanted to make the greatest songs that he could when he was making a record like Viva La Vida or Death and All of His Friends, but there are also records that would have made some of the casual rock fans in their audience a little confused like on A Head Full of Dreams.
You can call them sell-outs if you want to, but if you look past some of the glitz and glamour behind their productions, you can’t say they aren’t still trying. No one would have had the guts to test their audience with a ten-minute song that changed time signatures like on Music of the Spheres, but even if they made some of the most hard-edged music of their career, chances are they would still be looked at as the band that made that one EDM song with the Chainsmokers and never were good ever again.
So while I’m not writing this as a Coldplay apologist by any means, Bono does have a point when talking about how Martin uses his moral compass on many of his records. The band are still trying their hardest to innovate their sound, and even in an age where they don’t really need to try anymore, the fact that they are at least attempting to move in a different direction is at least somewhat commendable.
