Now, whether they want to or not, a group of upstarts represent Britain’s only hope. They dropped down with ‘Parachutes’ and in ‘A Rush of Blood to the Head’ they appear ready to lead the charge up the Billboard Charts. Their new weaponry is excellent – big, diverse, direct and convincing. If only Coldplay sounded more confident about it.

“We’re almost the worst people you can ask about the record,” says guitarist Jonny Buckland. “We don’t know if it’s any good anymore, but we know we thought it was good when we were doing it and we know we did everything we could to make it as good as we can. But I don’t think it’s something we’ll ever listen to and enjoy.”

“Do you think Coldplay people will get into it?” asks singer Chris Martin, with an air of genuine concern. “We’ve just got no idea if anyone’s going to like it.”

Maybe Coldplay aren't fit to be combatants -after all, just last year, when Brit music godfather Alan McGee called their songs "bedwetters' music," they responded with vague placatory remarks about how they liked the work he'd done with Creation Records. But there are, perhaps, other ways to succeed.

"I think we should be enlisting in U.N. peacekeeping forces," says drummer Will Champion. "We're getting good at conflict resolution." It turns out these Coldplayers are cunning. They take the piss out of themselves and disarm their opponents. So far, their strategy is working.

Will Champion and Jonny Buckland make a good double act, sitting in a cozy room somewhere in the labyrinthian depths of their North London rehearsal studio. Both sport prodigious amounts of facial hair, perhaps the musicians' equivalent of playoff scruff, grown during the time they spent in isolation recording the album.

"There's always some conflict that needs resolving somewhere in the studio," Champion explains, "whether it's over a drum loop or a bass drum pattern." "The famous bone of contention on most songs!" laughs Buckland. Over the course of eight months, Coldplay somehow managed to sort things out to their satisfaction. "Everything took a long time," claims Champion. Buckland concurs: "We're perfectionist in that we have to make sure every single note and everything that's on there, whether it's right or wrong -we examine everything that we've done. We spent about a thousand hours creating about 45 minutes of music!"

Coldplay had help in the studio from producer Ken Nelson, a "good mood man" according to Champion, who also helmed Parachutes. As well, they were visited in the studio by Liverpool legend Ian McCulloch, of Echo And The Bunnymen fame.

"Ian was hanging around quite a lot," remembers Champion. "He'd come in, drink wine and listen to us play and stuff. He's an amazing storyteller and raconteur. He can captivate a room. There's no chance of anyone else being the centre of attention in the room. Completely holds court over everything."

Hanging out with other musicians, from the Bunnymen to Rammstein (who are "the nicest guys in the world," according to Champion) helped Coldplay make A Rush Of B1ood To The Head go off in many musical directions. "God Put A Smile Upon Your Face" is an intense, blues PJ Harvey-esque stomp; "Green Eyes" shows bassist Guy Berryman's love of country music; "Daylight" has a string line influenced by the Bunnymen's "The Cutter" and the opener, "Politik," takes the pulsing snare beats from Travis' "Sing" and marries them to two towering choruses -it sounds almost...
"Angry," suggests Buckland. It's not exactly the first word one would have associated with Coldplay, but now that they mention it... "I like the darkness” claims Champion. "It's odd, 'cause [with] the first album, we either got told that we were melancholy miserablists or that we were really naively happy. A lot of people just based their opinion of our songs on 'Yellow,' and someone could say it's a really happy song, blah, blah. It isn't really a particularly happy song. It's quite sad, really, with what he [Chris] is talking about- unrequited devotion. People have got it wrong. We're not necessarily happy all of the time or sad all of the time. I don't think anyone is, really. And in the first album and this one, it's reflective of hopefully what real life is -its ups and downs."

Did it surprise the band when people latched onto "Yellow" as a happy song? "I think we got really super caught-up in how amazingly huge it was," says Buckland, "and it was like, 'Wow, all these people are singing our song.' I didn't really think about what people thought it was about, but I don't know. It's not a sad song; it's just quite melancholic." "I don't know what it is about that song that made it so huge," confesses Champion. Buckland speaks up: "It's probably the guitar." "Probably the guitar -out-of-tune guitars!" "It's perfectly in tune -purposely dissonant!" Champion backs off to make peace. "I think if we knew what it was about that song that made it so popular, this next album would be the biggest-selling album of all time."

"I don't want to say, 'We want to be the biggest band in the world,"' says bassist Guy Berryman. "Because I'm not sure if that is what we want to do. I don't want to say, 'We just want to make another record,' because that's the last thing in the back of all of our minds, driving us insane. We'll just go out and tour and give it everything when we play and just basically try and make people really enjoy themselves and enjoy the music. I think there's a lot of shows you can go and see these days which don't really do anything for you. I'm not going to name any names, but there's just a lot of mediocre stuff. I guess what we want to achieve is to never be described as being mediocre."

It's a modest enough ambition, but strangely enough, of the four, bassist Guy Berryman seems the happiest with A Rush Of B1ood To The Head. He's the least talkative in a group setting, but face-to-face, he seems serene, quietly self- confident- not at all yellow.

We sit in a hangar-like room just off of Coldplay's rehearsal space, adorned only by a pop machine (how ironic) and, inexplicably, a small car. Of course, there are a lot of unexplained things about the complex. The men's washroom is connected to the cafeteria kitchen. Some rooms are beautifully furnished; others are a mess of pipes and insulation. Shady characters who look like rock stars ghost the hallways, as do Rastas with big dreads and small children. It's best not to ask; at least Berryman seems at peace, even as in the next room, his band mates whoop it up as they watch 'Ireland earn a draw against Germany in the World Cup.

When questioned about what he wants to achieve on a personal level, he hesitates. "Our driving force is we want to be as good as we can. You never reach your limit. You can always keep going. You're interviewing us at a strange, transitional period in our lives. We haven't really relaxed from recording the album and we haven't really geared up [for] going out, touring and all this promotional mentality. I don't know. We'll just get on with it. There's nothing more exciting than playing a new song to people live."

Hence the rehearsals that have been going on for the past week. Coldplay look energized as they run through everything from "Don't Panic," the first song on Parachutes, through charged new material, to covers of the Bunnymen's "Lips Like Sugar" and Bowie's "Heroes." In a few weeks' time" they'll be headlining at Glastonbury.

"It would be terrifying if we just kind of turned up there under-prepared," Berryman confesses. "It would just be a nightmare."

As it turns out, Coldplay will get things together in spectacular fashion for Glasto and their performance will be rated a triumph by both the music and the general press -the new songs, which they've written with live performance in mind, having gone down a storm in surprisingly clement weather. It may always rain on Fran Healy, but Coldplay have no such problems.

Berryman seems fairly resigned to the media's incessant Travis/Radiohead comparisons: "If you were trying to describe our music to someone and you wanted to tell them quickly, would you say Travis or Black Sabbath? You would say Travis, 'cause we're much more like them."

When it comes to A Rush Of Blood To The Head, he holds out hope: "I'd be surprised if anyone compares this album to any other album. I'd be hard-pressed to do that myself... I hope people will have heard of us and will take it just as being Coldplay's second record and not OK Computer or something like that. I hope you don't describe it as Coldplay's OK Computer!
Of course not. That would be their third album... If there is one. ...

In a recent NME interview, Chris Martin suggested Coldplay's sophomore effort could be their last. The way his voice has been, you'd be surprised if he were even able to promote it - an initial interview is cancelled due to one of his persistent colds, which tend to go straight for his larynx. A week later, he talks gamely in the hangar-like room, occasionally taking draughts from an inhaler. "I just started having singing lessons again," claims Chris, whose vocals on A Rush Of Blood are unusually soulful and expressive. "My teacher told me this morning that I was basically shit." How did he respond? "I said, 'You're right. You're right."'

He's got an odd mix of swagger and deference, does Mr. Martin. Hanging out with Ian McCulloch, he claims, has given him confidence ("It made me think, 'Yeah, shit, we'll just do whatever we want. So what if Rolling Stone doesn't like us or the NME is slagging us off or whatever."') But he still has a goofy, self-deprecating side. As Coldplay begin rehearsing their new single, "In My Place," he leaves the microphone and bounds across the room to shout in my ear: "We're playing to a backing track because we can't afford strings!" then runs back, just about in time to sing the first note.

"At the moment," he claims, "I'm obsessed with, 'Why on Earth have I been given this amazing opportunity when other people haven't?' And I'd better make the most of it, because it's amazing to be given a gift. Some of the album's about that, I suppose. Like, 'Fucking hell, I can't believe this.' You know what I mean? 'Why me?' In a positive way, 'Why me? I'm a twat!"'

Chris' gift, it seems, means he doesn't have to compose songs; they “arrive." As in, "When 'Yellow' arrived, I thought, 'Bloody hell. I can't believe we've got that song. That'll be a single."' Sometimes, though, it's a struggle to control the songs that arrive. "We didn't want to make Parachutes 2, but we didn't want to forget the things that we liked about us. We went through a phase of wanting to be a heavy rock band, like a year ago, but luckily, we weren't allowed in the studio then. Otherwise, we would have made a very bad version of Back In Black.

"It's a good day when you stop worrying about what people think you don't sound like and just worry about what you think you should sound like. 'Cause there was a phase when we were thinking, 'Right, we'll show them.' We were butchering all these songs, but then eventually we decided we should do the songs in the way that they should be done and not just plug everything into 12."

Making this and other decisions involved a great deal of diplomacy, a willingness to suck things up and a division of labour. For instance, Chris admits, "Sometimes I write incredibly shit lines and it's Will's job to tell me so." , Not every band that plays together stays together, but a group whose members can insult each other and not give a damn doesn't need to take anyone else down. With this camaraderie, rumours of Coldplay's imminent demise are obviously exaggerated. They may not want to go back into the studio for a long time, but there are certainly some things left to prove.

"I don't want us to be some mid-range band who made a couple of all right albums," declares Chris. "We're not aiming to do that. I hate the fact that I have to look up to people. I don't want to have to look up to Paul McCartney; I’d rather just be on a level."

Them's fightin' words. Well,close enough...

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