Coldplay bassist Guy Berryman: ‘I’m very grateful I’m not in the limelight’
If you ever find yourself watching a Coldplay gig, particularly in person, it’s just possible your eye might sometimes drift from Chris Martin’s kaleidoscopic showmanship and off to the left. There, your gaze would inevitably rest on the smouldering, ever-so-cool figure of Guy Berryman gently bobbing on the bass guitar. At that point, you might wonder what he’s thinking about.
A consummate professional, Berryman insists that it’s always the music. In Coldplay, he says, it’s Chris Martin’s job “to run and jump around and project energy, and it’s my job and Will’s [Champion, the drummer] and Jonny’s [Buckland, the lead guitarist] jobs to hold it down musically. So there’s always a focus on playing.”
But you could forgive his mind for occasionally wandering to private passions, especially during a song like Yellow, which by one estimate he has performed live 1,120 times since 1999. In that case, the answer to what Guy Berryman’s thinking about could be a long one. Because when it comes to private passions, few can rival the quiet man of Coldplay.
Berryman, 46, is a magpie, so much so that before considering all the different things he collects, he must start by collecting his thoughts. “Um…” he begins. “I collect vintage garments. I collect cameras. I collect automotive periodicals from the 1930s onwards. I collect books – I’ve got a big library of mostly reference books, thousands. I’ve got a collection of cars, not as many as I used to, but about 15, mostly from the 1960s, which I never drive. Hmm, what else… Watches? A few of those…”
After a pause, he remembers he has a lot of guitars and “a few thousand” vinyl records. There are, I say, worse ways to spend the many millions you’ve earned from being in one of the world’s most successful rock bands. “Yeah. I feel like I collect meaningful stuff, and interesting stuff, it’s not stuff people could copy-and-paste easily. I’m not interested in shopping for new stuff, it’s always far more interesting to buy something old.”
We are meeting in Amsterdam, where Berryman lives with his Dutch partner, Keshia Gerrits, their two young children, Lucien and Bea, and his teenage daughter, Nico, from a previous marriage. It is a rare day off from Coldplay’s open-ended “Music of the Spheres” world tour, and two days after Glastonbury, which the band triumphantly headlined for a fifth time. Berryman was in and out, staying in Somerset only as long as he needed to.
“I’m not really a festival person,” he says. Getting there too early gives him “the heebie-jeebies”. But he was still nervous. “Which is good sometimes, it gives you a little bit of extra zip. Sometimes shows are a bit too comfortable. Because it’s sort of routine, and familiar.”
Berryman has lived here, in the centre of Amsterdam, since December. Before that, his home was in the Cotswolds. “Every time I’d fly home [before] I’d feel sad to leave. I just love this city so much. The culture scene’s amazing. Art’s great. The restaurant scene’s great. The music scene’s so good. It’s a very creative city,” he says. “I have two small children, and they were getting to the age where I felt they needed a bit more culture and activities. They needed to be around more people. So it felt like the right thing to do.” The Cotswolds, he adds, “is a bit of a bubble. It’s great for farm shops…”
Amsterdam is also where Berryman has based his other great venture, Applied Art Forms, a fashion label conceived at the tail end of 2017, when Coldplay took its first ever sabbatical. (”Not that it stopped Chris working, he’s a complete workaholic…”) Berryman, also prompted by his impending 40th birthday, began to think about what else he wanted to achieve creatively. So he turned to his collections.
The cars and magazines had already encouraged a business – The Road Rat, a motoring periodical he founded in 2017. But then he considered his bulging archive of vintage clothing. Berryman has a particular penchant for jackets and trousers, especially 20th-century military uniforms and workwear, plus the immaculately woven fabrics produced on ancient looms in Japan, anything by Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, and the 1990s work of labels such as Comme des Gar?ons, Helmut Lang, Katharine Hamnett and Martin Margiela.
“I came up with an idea to do something in design, and saw the archive and thought, well I’ll start a fashion label, and if it doesn’t work, I don’t care.” The archive served as the catalyst: Berryman would make clothes inspired by that beloved collection.
The vintage wardrobe to end all vintage wardrobes is housed in various locations in Amsterdam, and is huge, with not only contemporary garments but 19th-century Dutch work clothes, Napoleonic-era soldiers’ uniforms and Second World War air force kit from both America and Britain. As Berryman tours the world he adds to it, but it swells most whenever Coldplay is in Japan.
“The best place in the world for vintage clothing. I think the last time I was in Tokyo, I sent six 100 litre holdalls full of clothes home. Which just grows the archive we have to work from as inspiration.”
Applied Art Forms officially launched in 2020. Today we are at the label’s studio, which, appropriately enough, is on some stylishly regenerated land just across the water from central Amsterdam. The small team Berryman leads creates collections that pay homage to the utilitarian, functional vintage he loves.
Each of the Applied Art Forms garments – some of which Berryman calls his “Frankenstein’s monsters” – even has a creative lineage customers can read. In the studio, he and his colleagues guide me through the connections between one Napoleonic-era military uniform and a perfectly 2024 pair of trousers, or an old piece of Second World War US Air Force kit and a modular jacket they’ve designed. “You could say these older clothes were unnecessarily well made, but every flourish has a purpose, it makes sense and made it last,” he says.
Today Berryman is wearing a boxy, short-sleeved ecru shirt from his own label, with wide-legged jeans and trademark New Balance trainers. It is a uniform of sorts; and very Applied Art Forms. “Everything we make here is because it’s something I want to wear, I’m not designing for anyone else, it’s things I think look good. Our principles are about quality and limited quantities, and I think that’s more what people are looking for these days.”
The clothes Berryman sells are beautiful: this is no vanity project by a bored musician, even if he does get the bulk of the work done in the (ample) downtime on tour. Born in Kirkaldy in Fife, he studied engineering and architecture at University College London, and remains healthily obsessed with all elements of design.
He is affable and open on all topics, but his eyes really light up at the opportunity to discuss the legendary Motown bassist James Jamerson (who inspired him to choose his instrument); the outerwear Armani produced in the 1990s; or the exact stitching – which only lingerie seamstresses could execute – on Nasa’s Apollo-era spacesuits.
As a student in the late 1990s, he was mainly in T-shirts and hoodies: “I wasn’t really interested in what I was wearing, I was just a music nerd, going out, drinking beer and getting stoned…” That changed as Coldplay took off, sending Berryman around the world on an “absolutely mad journey” that’s seen the band sell more than 100 million albums, win seven Grammys and nine Brit Awards, and become arguably the most respected live band in the world.
Martin, the effulgent leader of the band, has made a running joke of Berryman’s aesthetic qualities and natural timidity. “My entire life is spent trying to push him forward at photoshoots,” he has said. “He’s our packaging, he’s a handsome bastard.”
I put it to Berryman that he has the perfect level of fame and fortune: all the glamour and remuneration from the above success, but none of the downsides of celebrity. He laughs. “Yeah, it’s brilliant, we’re a band made up of three introverts fronted by an extrovert. [Martin] takes the hit, and he likes the hit, which you have to, to some degree, in order to do that job. And he’s good at it. I’m very grateful that we’re not particularly in the limelight.”
Coldplay often wear Applied Art Forms on tour at the moment, not that Berryman likes to advertise it. In fact they all did – with personal embellishments in the form of patches or paint-splatters – at Glastonbury. Berryman’s jacket was particularly covetable. “Oh, that’s from a winter collection out later this year,” he says, delighted I noticed.
I presume Martin (who favours a form-fitting look) shrinks his clothes in the wash. “Ha, well he’s wearing new trousers, they’ve got a lot more volume in the leg now, because he used to wear these super-tight ones, with a tight T-shirt, but I’ve finally got him wearing something a bit looser, which he now loves because he can move in them,” Berryman says.
The never-ending world tour chugs on. Berryman still enjoys it, and finds plenty of time to focus on his collections. But what Applied Art Forms most definitely is not, he says, is “merch”. You won’t find it next to viva la vida bumper stickers at Coldplay gigs; he does not sell his wares with the LED wristbands at Glasto.
As far as he knows, the band and the brand have, he says, different typical customers. Or at least, he slightly hopes they do. “The greatest joy for me is when somebody walks into somewhere like Dover Street Market and knows nothing about the brand, or the affiliation with me, or Coldplay, but they love it so they buy it. For me, that’s the absolute win.”