After 25 years in the music business, Coldplay have appeared on almost every TV and radio show you can imagine, so when it came to promoting their 10th album, Moon Music, they decided to try a different tack.
On Thursday night, the band popped into the US arm of tele-shopping channel QVC to hawk copies of their latest record – as well as a toaster and tea set based on the artwork.
“That is vastly more important than the album,” joked frontman Chris Martin.
“Because we’re older now, we’re moving into crockery and Tupperware. The music is really just serving our kitchen line now.”
Martin has previously hinted that Moon Music could be the band’s final album.
“Our last proper record will come out in 2025 and after that I think we will only tour,” he told BBC Radio 2’s Jo Whiley in 2021.
“Maybe we’ll do some collaborative things but the Coldplay catalogue, as it were, finishes then.”
However, he subsequently backtracked those comments, saying the band would finish after 12 albums instead.
“I’ll tell you why,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe earlier this week.
“It’s really important that we have that limit. There’s only 12 and a half Beatles albums. There’s about the same Bob Marley, so all of our heroes.
“And also having that limit means that the quality control is so high right now, and for a song to make it, it’s almost impossible, which is great. And so where we could be kind of coasting, we’re trying to improve.”
Mixed reviews
So far, Moon Music has had a mixed reception from critics – with an average score of 61 on the review aggregation website Metacritic.
The NME was among the most positive, saying the record highlighted “the power of music to weather life’s storms” in a four-star review.
“It’s every bit as intergalactically ambitious as you’d expect,” agreed Rolling Stone, calling it “musically spacious and emotionally boundless”.
Not at all, said the UK’s Independent Newspaper, this record is “suffocatingly banal” and filled with “groan-inducing” lyrics.
“Martin has never been the most poetically complex of lyricists,” added The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick, but “does the world really need” songs that sound “like Instagram self-help slogans?”
But reviews are unlikely to make much of a dent in the band’s reputation. They recently announced a record-breaking 10-night residency at Wembley Stadium for summer 2025.
During their QVC appearance, the band played several of their new songs, with accompaniment from Soweto’s Mzansi Youth Choir.
They also attempted to take calls from the audience – but their phone handsets failed, leaving host Jennifer Coffey to relay messages through an earpiece for part of the show.
Among the callers was a Florida fan called Candy, who told the band she’d bought tickets to see them in 2008, but had to miss the show when her father passed away.
Martin quickly improvised a song in her honour, singing: “I’m sorry we missed you back in 2008, but some things are better when you’re forced to wait.”
Within 10 minutes of the segment airing, Coffey said 31,000 people were shopping for copies of the album on the QVC website.
For context, the current number one album in the US, Future’s Mixtape Pluto, sold 129,000 copies in its first week on the charts.
