10 Intelligent Questions for Coldplay

please don't make me think these up myself

How do you feel about becoming a stadium rock band like U2?

Maybe ask it in a nicer way, but that's what everything's been saying about them.

Why do you seem to avoid specificity so much in your lyrics? Do you think pop music is best when it trades in vague or inexpressible feelings - and how would you answer the accusation that your vaguer songs ("Politik" for instance) are trite? You've suggested that A Rush Of Blood... is in some way a post-Sept 11 album - to what extent is that true, and if it is true, was part of your intention with the album to be thought-provoking?

i love you ilm! keep em coming

Ask them if these lyrics from Politik are a joke or serious:

Look at earth from outer space
Everyone must find the place
Give me time and give me space
Give me real, don't give me fake

Give me strength, reserve control
Give me heart and give me soul
Give me love give us a kiss
And tell me your own Politik

1. What label are you on? Who owns them?

2. What do you think about the phenomenon of 'Corporate Indie'? Is it here to stay?

3. Why do your songs have lyrics?

4. What's your 2nd favourite Smiths B-side?

5. Who is your favourite popular songwriter from the pre-rock&roll era?

6. What do you think popular music has lost since 1950?

7. What is Country?

8. Are there any grounds for judgments of value?

9. Who was the best pop critic of the 1980s?

10. Is there too much sex in Gravity's Rainbow?

The instrumentation on songs such as In Your Place sound very much like a film score. Have you ever considered composing one?

In the Star Trek series, what was the number on the first "Enterprise" ship?

What is the average rainfall in the Amazon basin?

1) Durutti Column - Classic or Dud?

2) Is your drummer ever going to stop bloody scowling?

3) Is he aware that if the wind changes his face will stay that way?

4) How does he expect to ever meet a nice young girl if he's going to walk around with a face like Big Ron off Eastenders immediately after discovering he's just sat in a puddle of treacle?

5) Are you still in touch with any members of Campag Velocet?

6) Assuming that you one day become big enough to have huge inflatables on stage, what design would you choose?

7) Why?

8) If The Bluetones, Menswear, Sleeper and Echobelly were to have a fight, who would win?

9) Do you feel that Hundred Reasons are desecrating the 'huge mass of unkempt curly hair' look that you used to sport?

10) You awake at 4 AM to find a tramp pissing on your bins. What do you do?

If you were on a desert island with MTV becoming, which pair of pants would you bring with you?

If you had 3 wishes with MTV Wish, which delicious cola would you choose to drink?

Which is more honest, a recording or a live performance?

Do you see yourself in a tradition of British bands?

Do you worry about hair loss?

This kicks ass all over Q's "Cash For Questions".

Except there is no cash.

What was all Yellow?

Do you see yourself in a pantheon of musicians wot went to UCL (Brett Anderson and Justine Froishmann to name two). If you is there constant pressure to say stupid things and take loads of drugs?

What question do you always want to be asked and no-one ever does?

Do you think rock bands have a responsibility to have a political conscience or is it merely a desperate grab to talk about something more interesting in interviews?

Would you buy your records?

if you order yr records by colour not alphabetically, where would you file "yellow"?

In real life, are My Vitriol really as tiresome as they seem?

Imagined answers to Pinefox's questions:

1. Erm...too many people want to like put labels on bands and things. No one like owns us, yeah? I mean it's no logo like the book, innit, hail fellow well met oops pardon me - I dunno wot label but like they give us nice haircuts and French fisherman's stripey jumpers to go with Macarthur Park srripey pair of pants.

2. Well, it's like, them Monkhouses you don't see 'em on the telly anymore, but they've gotta earn a living somehow so they have to do corporate indie so it must be 'ere to stay innit. I could do all that after-dinner speaking malarkey why only the other semester I was vehemently decrying Strachey's ill-informed character assassination of Cardinal Manning oops I never said that yeah John Best'll kill us man.

3. Well that's a stupid like question I mean you play for people and if people like our music it's a bonus 'cos really we make music for ourselves but people can't like our music if they can't sing along to it so that's why we have like lyrics and that.

4. (quick as a flash) Rubber Ring.

5. Er, we ain't like 90 years old how do you expect us to remember things before we was born? Erm, who's that fella Parky Parkinson plays on a Sunday morning on Radio 2 - er - Hoagy Bear, that's 'im. I quite like 'im. Of course the intricate WS Gilbert-derived internal rhymes of Johnny Mercer's lyrics might possibly be more aesthetically worthy than the straight-talking but fundamentally stark laments for lost or unrequited love penned by Larry Hart, but I never like said that, right?

6. Erm...Richey Edwards 'cos they ain't never found 'im yet, 'ave they, and that was '95 or something wannit, so yeh, like, him.

7. Place you live in innit?

8. Yeah there's Christie's up the road in Sarf Ken from my unassuming three-storey mews house expensively redesigned from Lutyens' original blueprints oops I did it like again.

9. Peter Powell 'e used to do five 45s at 5:45 do all the new releases every day and 'e always said like JoBoxers would 'ave a number one an' they nearly dunnit, inthey?

10. Cor blimey no can you imagine Zippy getting it off with George that'd be a laugh - erm, it's a book? I never read a novel in my life apart from Catcher In The Rye. So that's the best book ever written! No contest!

your record company has decreed that in order to secure your next contract, you must help solve the overpopulation problem on planet Self-Importance, which is characterised by its lack of density, even though there are only two known inhabitants - bono and sting. you've only got one space-bullet and you MUST use it, otherwise every fey pop band with lyrics on the wrong side of radiohead-depth will be consigned to a life of playing kajagoogoo covers in a remote albanian souphouse for evuh and evuh. who gets zapped and why?

1. Will you touch whats in my pocket?
2. Will you know when to quit or will you become Status Quo?

1. What does your music signify?
2. How many times have you heard Troutmask Replica and do any of you have a party trick like the Captain?
3. In the final analysis, how many bands do you think will make it big because of Radiohead's The Bends?
4. Which one of you has the biggest dick?
5. Say something intelligent damn you.
6. How does it feel to be pedestrian?
7. What time is love?
8. How many groupies have each of you fucked?
9. Are you more or less boring than your music implies?
10. If I carried on this line of questioning, roughly how many more questions would it take before you cracked and slammed your pint glass into my nose?

OK, deadline's past. don't bother anymore. I used a couple of your questions. none of the really mean or non-sequiterish ones, sadly.

who'd you talk to, fritz?

and what for?