Coldplay Bassist Guy Berryman: ‘What We Have Is Unbelievably Special’
In the 28 years since the members of Coldplay met in their first-year dorm at University College London, each has, according to the band’s lore, played a certain role: Chris Martin is the creative genius, drummer Will Champion the voice of reason, guitarist Jonny Buckland the moral center, and bassist Guy Berryman the arbiter of cool. “Any coolness that Coldplay have at all comes from Guy,” confirms band manager Phil Harvey. “He’s a cool dude.”
From afar, Berryman certainly appears that way — his eyes downcast, his dark hair mussed, his body swaying subtly, and his fingers moving with precision over his instrument — during the Australian leg of Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour, which just so happens to be the most attended tour of all time. But on the November afternoon when I meet him in the restaurant of his Sydney Hotel (part of my reporting for our January cover story on the band), he comes off as far more sincere and thoughtful than the “cool” label alone would suggest. Sitting at a corner table, with his back to impressive views of the Sydney opera house, he spoke slowly and softly, reminiscing on the band’s early days, considering their decades-long evolution, and speaking frankly on the chemistry that’s kept them together all these years. “We’re all very aligned with each other, the four of us,” he tells me. “What we have is unbelievably special.”
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I think you and I have some friends in common and might have run into each other in New York back in the aughts.
I mean, it would’ve been one of those dark nights down in Black & White bar or wherever it was.
That’s where it would’ve been.
When we first started going to New York, we were hanging out with The Strokes, and there was a whole underground musicians kind of drinking scene there.
Seems like another life.
Yeah, I mean, it’s crazy. I always think how lucky we are. When we got into the music industry, it was before streaming. If you wanted to buy an album, you would go into a store and pay 20 bucks for a CD. The record companies would be making loads of money from acts like Robbie Williams, and then that money would filter down into the different imprint labels like Parlophone, and they would find bands like us and give us money and develop us. There was an infrastructure for so many more people to be artists and to have a career as a musician. Now anyone I know who is a musician, they have to have another job. Now record companies are interested in you turning up with something you’ve already written, produced, recorded. “And by the way, how many followers do you have on TikTok? And then maybe we’ll talk.”
Well, is that one of the reasons why y’all bring on a bunch of local acts when you’re on tour?
Yeah, I think we’re all acutely aware of how tough it is for people now to find an opportunity. You might be a really super talented musician but just not very good at social media. Or you might just be great at social media and you might become a star without anything of huge substance. So I guess it kind of works both ways. And I think we are acutely aware of the fact that we’re still going and we’re still played on mainstream radio stations after so long — we don’t take that for granted. I think that’s why when Chris [Martin] goes into cities, he wants to meet all of the local artists that are on the label and to just kind of connect with them.
When you’re in a stadium playing “Yellow,” for instance, are you thinking back to whatever was happening when that song was written or do they sort of evolve in your mind?
I think they do evolve. It’s always about being in the moment, performing to the best of your ability. And my job is really about micro-timing. My job is not to be the guy that’s bringing the entertainment or adding the color or whatever. Everything I do has to be like a lockstep. I have to listen to Will, and when his kick drum hits, my note has to hit at the same time.
But I do try and change the way I play songs. Even to this day, I will adjust the angle of my plectrum a little bit because I think I’m getting a slightly better timing in a song like “Yellow.” I’ll say, “Okay, if I do it this way, it sounds a bit tighter.” So for me, the challenge is just every night to go up there and play everything a little better than you’ve ever played it before. It’s a very mechanical job I have.
I mean, you’ve talked a lot about what got you into music, but why specifically did you first pick up a bass?
When I listen to music, I tend to listen to something that makes me want to move physically. I just really loved the rhythms of soul and funk — which went against the grain of what all of the other kids in school were listening to. All of that music is really coming from the rhythm section and the bass. If you think about Motown, it’s quite an amazing story. The songwriters would write a song on the piano, and then it would be given to the house band — they’re sort of loosely called The Funk Brothers — to then say, “Okay, what are the rhythms and arrangements we can add to this song that’s just been brought in,” for whichever artist was going to sing it.
And those guys did all of this incredible work to create the sound and the feel and the energy of Motown. It’s only really in the last 10 years that those people have started getting credit for their role in developing that sound.
And you knew that history then?
Not really, I just felt the music. The first thing that I ever really connected with musically was when I was maybe six or seven, and I was in my sister’s bedroom and she had a cassette player and a box of cassettes, and I was just like, “What is this?” I put a cassette in it, and I pressed the button. I can remember that moment. It’s one of the clearest memories I have, the sound that came out of this thing. It was Stevie Wonder’s song, “My Cherie Amour,” and I was just transfixed by it. So I always loved that kind of music. And of course, that’s why I wanted to be a bass player, because I was into Motown and funk and James Brown. Also, listened to a lot of jazz when I was a teenager as well.
There was a jazz bar in Canterbury, which was the city I grew up in. I would go there with my friend, Paul, when we were 16. It was the only place we could get served alcohol without anybody really asking any questions. We used to sit there and drink Guinness, smoke cigarettes, and listen to jazz trios.
You’re the only member of Coldplay that dropped out of college, right?
Yeah. We formed the band, and I was like, “Okay, I think we have something.” I really believed in it. I mean, it was complete, youthful, dumb naivety.
I mean, you were right.
I worked in a bar for a year so I could just do the band. I always played in groups in school, and it was great, but it was always instrumental because there was no one that ever really wanted to be a singer. So when I met Chris, I was like, “Fuck, he can sing, and he wants to sing.” I can stand in a stadium full of 80,000 people and play my bass and love every single moment of it, but if you put me in a room with 20 people and a microphone and I need to do a speech or something, I crumble inside.
Karaoke is not your thing?
Oh, fuck no. Being such a quiet, introverted nerd — which is how I would describe myself — it just felt so great to connect with somebody who had that extrovert magic.
But were your parents losing their mind?
Not really. We were doing quite well with the band and things were happening and they could see I was just in love with the process. And then when the guys finished their courses, we had a record deal on the table.
What does the collaborative process look like right now versus back in the day?
Well, Chris has always been in charge conceptually. He’s the songwriter, he’s bringing the ideas, the album titles. He’s writing from the heart, to which we edit and contribute and shape and discuss what goes on, what goes off. But he’s really kind of a creative powerhouse.
The songs are credited to all of us. We were all such music nerds, and we saw some of our favorite bands just fall apart because they hadn’t structured themselves right, or this singer would be taking all the credit, taking all the money. I think we pitched it as a long game, like, “Okay, we’re going to do it together. We want everybody pulling in the same direction with the same amount of strength.” And that’s hard to do when you have somebody who’s getting super crazy rich and the other people [aren’t]. Then band members change, and when band members change, the chemistry goes. You lose something.
So what we have is unbelievably special, the four of us. Like the other night in Melbourne, I got sick and for the first time in our history, one of us didn’t make the show.
Which is actually amazing.
Yeah, it’s amazing. It got to six o’clock in the evening, and I was trying to rally — I mean, we’ve all done shows where we’ve been super sick with flu or COVID or whatever, and you can do it. You take a bunch of meds and you get up there and it’s tough, but you do it. But I got food poisoning and my blood pressure dropped and I couldn’t stand up. I texted Chris and said, “Brother, I’m really worried. I don’t actually think I can do this.” So they had to formulate a plan, and of course the stadium was half full, and you can’t fucking cancel a stadium show. People have flown in from different countries. They’ve planned. They’ve booked hotels. They’ve paid a fortune for tickets on resellers. So we had to come up with a plan.
Honestly, it got to the point where I knew it was showtime, and I was just laying in bed, thinking, “What have they figured out and how’s it all going to work?” The emotion of it really hit me, and I was just crying. It felt really super emotional. And then I suddenly realized, actually, however sad I was, in bed, feeling like shit, it must’ve been so fucking strange for [the other band members] being up there. I think it was the weirdest experience for them.
I know you have a studio that travels with you where you work on new music. Is working on an album while on tour atypical?
Yes and no. I mean, I don’t think we’ve ever kind of approached a new album like, “Okay, hey, let’s go in the studio because we need to start a new album.” We always have things which are left over from previous albums — they didn’t fit or we didn’t finish them or we didn’t unlock them. Sometimes you can’t quite get the song right. Sometimes it can take years for you to go, “Oh, okay, the rhythm was all wrong,” or “this chord was wrong,” or whatever.
And that’s what you mean by unlock it?
Yeah, it’s like a puzzle.
I assume you just have to give up sometimes.
Sometimes you do.
When do you decide to give up?
When you’ve tortured it mercilessly to death for several years, I think you have to let them go. And we’ve got so many things like that. I mean, I think one day there’s a project that we’ll do where we perhaps present those in an interesting way or something.
“We’re kind of dinosaurs in the way that we still approach making albums, trying to make them something really designed to be listened to from beginning to end as a journey.”
Chris has said that Coldplay will only put out two more albums. I’m glad to hear that that’s one of the ideas that’s percolating for the retirement period.
Yeah, I know. I mean, Chris is such an unstoppable force of nature creatively, so let’s see what happens. There’s so many things that have crossed my mind, like, “Well, maybe the last album can come in five parts or something like that.”
Really?
I don’t know. I suppose there’s a certain amount of fear attached with that idea of the final thing, because how do you really know what you’re going to feel like when you get to that day?
Do you feel apprehensive about it?
I don’t know, really. At [a certain] point it’s kind of like, how much do you need to put into the world? For us now, there’s a whole chunk of people that are just kind of only interested in listening to our first two albums. And everything that we’ve done since then is invalid. There’s also people that don’t know our first two albums and only accessed us through the song we did with BTS.
I don’t think we’ll ever stop touring. I think it’s really more about: What is an album? Who listens to albums? The whole landscape has really changed. It’s not even about songs now. It’s about 20 seconds of a song on TikTok that somebody sped up to twice the tempo or something. We’re kind of dinosaurs in the way that we still approach making albums, trying to make them something really designed to be listened to from beginning to end as a journey. There’s not many people consuming like that now.
I think we appreciate the fact that any great story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So, I think the idea is really to be in control of the end, somehow, rather than just fading away or not really having your heart in it or just going on too long. I guess the concept is to kind of stop before things change in any way, shape, or form.
When you’re on tour like this, I imagine it’s like being an athlete. It’s a marathon. But have you had a chance in Sydney to just sort of go out and chill?
So what’s great for me at the moment is for the last few years, I’ve had a fashion label, which is based in Amsterdam. I’ve never been somebody who goes out shopping to the kind of super fancy stores or the designer labels or whatever. But I like going to the thrift stores and the vintage stores and finding stuff.
Have you found some stuff in Sydney?
Oh my God, I found mountains. I’ve already sent five suitcases full of vintage back to the studio.
In December y’all will have a break for a while. What will that look like for you?
So I’ll go home and have a couple of weeks to reconnect with the family. I have an eighteen-year-old daughter, a six-year-old boy, and a three-year-old girl. The three-year-old is having a phase at the moment of extreme tantrums. I always thought that was the twos, right? People talk about the terrible twos, but she’s found her foothold in that kind of behavior, and there’s just no reasoning with her. So that’s where we’re at.
How long do you go without seeing your family?
Three weeks max. We’ve done this a long time, so we know that — I mean, I remember in the early days, I think it might have been on the third album, we did a nine-week tour of the States in a bus.
Like sleeping in the bunks of the bus?
Yeah. And you wake up in the venue and you go in and have a shower and take what you got to do. America’s big. For a British band to come and do the whole let’s-break-America thing, it’s like you’re going to basically 50 different countries, and you have to shake everyone’s hand and keep every radio station happy and do everything. When we were halfway through it, I remember thinking, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this.” And then by the end of it, I was just like, “I don’t know how we’re all still alive.”
Back then there was no kind of fitness regime. We didn’t have any awareness of the concept of mental health. It was like we would just get on the bus, and there’d be stacks of pizza and fridges full of beer, smoking weed, all of the usual tropes. And that’s how we got through it. Brutal.
It took a long time to learn that three weeks is the max we can go away, and then we need a certain amount of weeks off. And even within those three weeks, we know how many shows we can do, how many days off we need to place in there. So we’ve really got that dialed in.
When did you start realizing what the plan should be to keep yourselves healthy?
I don’t know. Things got a little out of hand for a while. And for me, it became quite problematic, just the lifestyle and partying and going out late and really not looking after myself.
Which album would you say that was around?
Oh, X&Y was the one where we had so much pressure on us from so many different angles. Because the first album came out, and it did really well but it was so quiet and acoustic. We were doing these shows and all these people were coming so it was like, “We need songs with a bit more energy.” And then the second album did really well — I think beyond people’s expectations — so by the time it came to the third album and we were doing quite big shows, we didn’t really know who we were supposed to be anymore. We kind of lost ourselves a little bit. And we lost our manager, Phil. He left. So we didn’t have his really important kind of embrace around us or guidance.
It’s funny: I really think we’re a little bit too hard on that album, because I really think it’s a magical album in many ways. But the songs are like five, six, seven minutes long. It’s just this kind of bombastic nature of them. Chris always says he’d love to go back to that album because all it needs is editing, just cutting here and there, and then you’d have something which is what we should have done. But at the same time, I’m always skeptical of doing things like that because you’ll meet somebody who’ll say, “Well, X&Y is my favorite album.”
I like that album a lot.
I like it more now than I think I’ve ever done. I was listening to stuff the other day, thinking, “Wow, that’s really inventive. But it could have been three-and-a-half minutes long, not seven.”
When you say you approached making music in a different way, what do you mean?
I feel like we were willing to accept guidance and input from an external source rather than us being, “We are the ones in control of this. We have to do this all ourselves.”
It’s probably a relief to sort of let go of that.
But it wouldn’t have happened without Brian [Eno] because it needed to be somebody that we held in such high esteem, where it’s not like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” It’s like, “You’re Brian Eno. You’ve told us to do this. We’re going to fucking do it.” And it was interesting with him, because he made us do so many experimental things. A lot of which didn’t come to anything.
What’s the most experimental thing he made you do?
Well, I think the most important thing is that he made us all sing. Brian loves singing. He still, every week, has an a capella group in his studio.
I’ve seen those videos of you singing in churches and stuff with him.
Yeah, he made us all sing, and he always said we were the hardest working band that never did any work.
What does that mean?
Well, we would spend weeks in the studio and not really do anything. Whereas he would come in and say, “Right, I’ve got this idea. Let’s try this. We’re going to play six bars of this chord, three bars of that chord. We’re going to throw in one bar of this chord, and then we’re going to repeat it. And every time it repeats, I want you to do something different.” So we would have these kind of mathematical exercises that he would make us do. Sometimes we’d sit there, and we’d be going, “What the fuck?” Or sometimes we would do something and go, “Hang on a minute, there was a moment — four minutes into this hour-long thing that we’ve just done where most of it was terrible — there was a moment where something happened.” So he just really got us out of our kind of mindset that we’d gotten stuck in, I think.
“Sometimes Chris will bring in something I don’t really get, but I trust his judgment. We used to fight and argue so much in the beginning, but now I feel like we’re closer than ever.”
I know back in the day there was a lot of butting heads over songs and ideas. Now when a good song arrives, everyone just kind of knows that?
Oh, no.
No?
Absolutely not. No. Sometimes a song is so obvious. Chris will bring something in, and it’s just like, ‘Wow, okay.” And it becomes our job to just basically not fuck it up. Or sometimes it’s kind of, “Okay, there’s something here. What does it need? How can we unlock the puzzle?” Or sometimes Chris will bring in something which I just don’t really get, but I trust his judgment. I feel like we used to kind of fight and argue so much in the beginning, but now I feel like we’re closer than we’ve ever been.
And I also feel like we’re really starting to get into uncharted territory now in terms of what we’re doing with the show and the people and the feeling and the service that I think we are providing to people. I feel it’s so much bigger than me, and it’s so much bigger than us as a band, that we just kind of have this duty now — especially in this day and age — to provide an opportunity for people to congregate and just have a moment of joy where you can forget about whatever you were going through just for a couple of hours. I think it’s become something that’s beyond our control now, actually.
When did it start feeling that way?
I think this tour.
I was flying over the night that Trump got elected. I was just kind of wondering what the vibe was like that night.
Honestly, I don’t think the vibe was hugely different in the crowd. For me, as we were approaching the stage, I just felt like, “This feels more meaningful to be walking up on stage, doing this, continuing to do it, and we just got to keep doing it.”
Do you have a favorite part of the show?
I mean, the start of the show is always special. It never gets old, walking into the stadium and hearing the noise and the first moment where the drums hit.
Let’s talk some about the tour’s sustainability initiatives.
Well, look, some of the technology is more showcasing technology. Like these floors people jump up and down on, of course it’s generating energy. But I think we always thought the idea would be, “Well, what if there’s somebody who’s going to do a nightclub or a mall or something like that, and they can see that you can put things on the ground that capture people’s movements?” Then there’s the rechargeable batteries that power the show. There’s not really one thing you can do which makes a huge change, but when you put all of the initiatives together, that’s when it starts becoming meaningful. We have this amazing solar-panel material, which they roll out behind the seats now.
I saw it last night.
It’s an evolution, right? We’ve never said, “Okay, this is it. Done now.” If somebody says, “Hey, we’ve invented this new thing, and maybe it’s cool for the show,” we’ll look at it. And if it’s good, we will put it in and we’ll kind of keep adding to it.
Does your 18-year-old recognize that her dad’s a rock star?
Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’s super creative. She loves music, art. She loves the shows. And the little ones are starting to get an idea. They’ve seen pictures of me on stage. Sometimes they come to the show and watch a couple of songs before they get tired and have to be taken back to the hotel. So they’re starting to get a little bit of an idea that I’ve got a slightly unusual job. Or maybe it’s just normal to them.
Well, that’s what I’m saying. I think it does get normalized.
It does. But I live in Amsterdam, and it’s such a nice place to live because I feel like the Dutch are just so grounded and down-to-earth. I just feel like it’s a country full of normality and common sense. I really particularly like living there.
I do want to go back to the retirement thing. You said there was a sense of sort of fear around it. Is that feeling sort of infused through what you’re doing?
It’s not a prevalent thought or worry that I have in my mind. I still feel like we still have so much right in front of us with this tour, with the ambitions we have for the creative projects that are currently on the table, being thought about, being worked on. I think we’re still years away from any kind of retirement.
But you have to have a plan. If you’re a runner and you’re running a marathon, you know you have to run 26 miles. But if somebody said to you, “Okay, start running and just don’t stop,” it’s quite hard to motivate yourself.
I’ve heard y’all talk about getting to a point where you didn’t feel like you have to be perfect anymore, that it’s more about creating this space for people to have this experience. How did you get to that point?
I think it’s just practice. I mean, I think we are really in uncharted territory. We are really kind of going through something together that I think nobody has done before, just in terms of the length of the career that we’ve had, the size of this tour, the love there is, and just the feeling that’s generated inside the stadiums — I don’t want to sound like I’m big blowing my own trumpet, but it just feels new to me. It feels like new territory. And it’s interesting: We talk a lot about retirement and ending, but there’s also a part of me that’s like, “Well, where else could this go?”
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