In 1998, Coldplay took their first step over the edge with Safety, their debut EP. The release contained only three songs, one of which — “No More Keeping My Feet on the Ground” — appeared as a B-side for “Yellow” two years later. It was around then that they truly felt the drop, beginning a decades-long free fall in which songs have appeared to Chris Martin from some enigmatic source to be shaped into hit Coldplay records. It was also at that time that the frontman knew what awaited the band at the end.
Martin broke down the plan in Coldplay’s Rolling Stone cover story, out today. At some point in the not-so-distant (but also not explicitly defined) future, they will release their final album, Coldplay. It will be their 12th and it won’t look too different from Safety. “The cover of the album, I’ve known it since 1999,” Martin told Rolling Stone in a new cover story. “It’s a photograph by the same photographer that took the photo that’s the cover of our first EP.” The Safety cover is a black-and-white image of Martin, blurry in a moment of captured motion. It was captured by John Hilton, who was school friends with guitarist Jonny Buckland.
Coldplay only released 500 copies of the EP. It’s one of the earliest physical artifacts of their career. Martin described their final album as being something of a homecoming in sound and, with the cover art reference, in a visual sense, too. He isn’t feeling overly sentimental about it. The musician has known for a while now that the beginning of the end of Coldplay as a recording act would be the animated musical he’s currently writing with his best friend and creative director Phil Harvey. Then, Coldplay will bring it all to a close, kind of.
There will be no more albums and no more blurry cover images to choose from. But there will still be live shows — and maybe a few songs, if bassist Guy Berryman had to guess. “Chris is never going to stop writing, so I kind of take it with a little bit of a pinch of salt,” Berryman said. “We’re still years away from any kind of retirement. But I think you have to have a plan. If you’re running a marathon, you know you have to run 26 miles. But if somebody said to you, ‘OK, start running and just don’t stop,’ it’s quite hard to motivate yourself.”
Martin added: “One day we’ll do a thing called Alphabetica, which will be lots of outtakes and songs that didn’t fit anywhere, but we’ll release them in a compendium. We’ll do a song that begins with A, and one that begins with B, because there’s enough to do that —we don’t have any spare songs with Q. That’s the one I’m stuck with.”
In 2010, Hilton reflected on the cover shoot, recalling: “There were blurred ones and sharp ones, but that one just looked nicely weird. I suppose at the time, I was justifying it as trying to capture him moving around the stage and being all crazy. And it also it fitted in with that dark, Radiohead-y thing that everyone was into at the time.”
The photographer noted that the title Safety came from the word being written on the camera film, hidden until it revealed itself on the printed image. “They were happy just to leave it there. So the name came from the picture,” he said. “It’s not a brilliant photograph by any means, but the reason I like it is that it’s a photograph by a kid at college of some kids at college and they went on to be a really big band. So, in that way, I’m really chuffed about it.”
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