Chris Martin

The goal is to try and make the perfect song. Which of course will never happen.

Music is split up now into little pockets.

When you’re on your fifth album, you are going to be judged against all your previous work and expectations.

Record sales don’t really mean anything. For us, the pressure is imagining some 15-year-old kid in Cincinnati who buys our album and doesn’t feel like he wasted his pocket money.

Celebrity culture has gone crazy, and I think the reason is that real news is just not bearable, and it also seems impossible to change anything.

Anything that we think is incredible and beautiful and wonderful, we ascribe to something that we don’t know what it is.

His (Freddie Mercury) words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don’t Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I’m Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: “Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.” Then there’s The March Of The Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him ‘the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

So when I come across as being everybody’s mate and nice and humble, I’m only nice and humble to a certain degree; the other side of me is arrogantly determined to do what the f**k I want.

I’ve had tinnitus for about ten years, and since I started protecting my ears it hasn’t got any worse – touch wood.

I managed to pick out some pretty special people.

When I first started racing, my father said, “Win the race as slow as you can.

It was fun to sing somebody else’s song.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

I don’t know, I like to go on really different types of dates. Going someplace new or some new part of the city, something that’s not your average thing. Something where you just go have an adventure together.

Everyone has an idea that they think would be a great movie. Everyone has a cousin who they think you should work with. Everyone has a warped vision of Hollywood and what success in Hollywood is like. That you love cocaine and that you spend every night in orgies with models. If only it were true.

It’s nice to be important, but it’s important to always be nice.

My younger sister and I had the same modeling agency.

When you’re on your fifth album, you are going to be judged against all your previous work and expectations.

Being good is about being an all-round contributor in the great world of music.

It’s VH1, it’s everywhere, and you know music is just the world right now. People love music.