Coldplay's drummer Will Champion has spoken about the band's new recording sessions without lead singer Chris Martin.
Coldplay are currently touring Australia but have recently been working on new material with producer Brian Eno.
Some of the sessions involved 'banning' frontman Chris Martin from the studio. Eno is renowned for his unique working methods in a recording studio, including his well-known Oblique Strategies.
MusicRadar is guessing that the band working without Martin was a result of Oblique Strategies' dictat: 'Only a part, not the whole'.
Oblique Strategies
Using his Oblique Strategies cue-cards and tactics in the past, Eno has made the members of U2 record simultaneously without being able to see each other, and asked them to 'emphasise the flaws'.
Speaking to Coldplay.com, drummer Will Champion was asked about the new Coldplay recording sessions and said this:
How did your time in the studio without Chris work out?
"Well, it was a Brian [Eno] thing.
"He said he felt like if you're always starting a song from the same point, there's only so much variation you can get. So, I think he wanted the three of us to explore things without really having a song to work to; maybe just a lyric or a fragment of a demo that Chris had done.
"And even if those experiments were totally useless, some little aspect of it might fit when the time comes to really start recording properly. I think it was just an exercise in trying to push us into doing new things, which we mightn't do if we had a fully-fledged song on our hands."
"Trying to actually impose structure and process on songs yields very interesting and different results" Coldplay's Will Champion
Were the results good?
"Yeah, it was actually very fruitful. We started off making rules for creating songs, forcing ourselves to think about the process of making music. They made you make decisions that you would never normally make. I don't think anyone has done more work or research on the process of making music than Brian. Trying to actually impose structure and process on songs yields very interesting and different results."
Is there some sort of plan about releasing something?
"No, that's one thing that there isn't. There's no imposing of any deadline or anything like that. We don't even know what it is that we want to make. It's a very strange time for the way people listen to music. It's getting more and more fragmented, with people buying single songs rather than albums.
"In many ways, it's going back to the way it was originally, where people would release singles and then an album was a collection of singles. We want to do something totally revolutionary, that hasn't been done before. We're writing with a view towards that. But what that is, we don't yet know."
So there you go. New Coldplay want to be "revolutionary". They're just not sure how yet.
Read everything Will Champion has to say on the official Coldplay website.
