She stole the Super Bowl halftime show from its headliners — now Beyonce has been revealed to have let Coldplay’s Chris Martin down in the studio as well.
A preview of Martin’s upcoming interview in Rolling Stone reveals that the Coldplay singer once presented a song called Hook Up to Beyonce and her producer Stargate — only to have it politely refused.
Beyonce turned the song down, Martin said, “in the sweetest possible way: She told me, ‘I really like you — but this is awful.’”
Rolling Stone puts the anecdote forward as evidence of Martin’s being “open to constructive criticism, especially from Beyonce”. But it’s equally representative of Beyonce’s famously discerning approach to her career.
The report follows an earlier revelation that the late David Bowie once turned down a potential collaboration with Coldplay because, according to their drummer, Will Champion, he said it was “not a very good song”. (Chris Martin tells the story: “He called me and said, ‘It’s not one of your best.’”)
But after the false start, Beyonce went on to collaborate with Coldplay on Hymn for the Weekend, a single from their new album A Head Full of Dreams — not necessarily a great song, but by no means awful. (Though the video, which shows Martin and the rest of the band having a jolly time in India, has drawn criticisms of cultural appropriation.)
Although Coldplay were the headliners for the Super Bowl 50 halftime entertainment, by all counts the show belonged to their support acts, Beyonce and Bruno Mars.
Beyonce performed Formation, a song she’d released only the day before. Backed by dancers wearing Black Panther-style berets, she gave a Black Power salute; coinciding with Black History Month in the US and Canada, her performance has been described as the most political statement at a Super Bowl in its 50-year history.
With his own posse of backing dancers, Bruno Mars sang Uptown Funk, the biggest track of 2015, which has eclipsed 1.3 billion plays on YouTube and had a greater combined sales and streaming total than any other track last year.
Coldplay, meanwhile, relived their performances from Glastonbury (“the amazing sort of spiritual home of music”) and performed 10-year-old material.
Earlier this month the Guardian asked: “Will Coldplay become Super Bowl halftime legends?” The response — on social media, and from cultural and music critics — indicates the answer is ‘no’.
Rolling Stone reports that its upcoming interview with Martin details how “he trained physically and plotted just how Bruno Mars and Beyonce would play their roles onstage”.
Martin also expresses bewilderment over the widespread appeal of jokes about his band, such as “Coldplay? More like Coldpause the show!”
“I had a couple of years in the mid-2000s where it was really confusing to me,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was like, ‘Why is our band sometimes a punchline?’” The Twitter response to the Super Bowl reveals that this particular strand of comedy is alive and well in 2016.
The Rolling Stone interview also features Martin discussing his high-profile “conscious uncoupling” from the actor-cum-lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow, with whom he has two children, Apple and Moses.
“I have a very wonderful separation-divorce,” he said. “It’s a divorce — but it’s a weird one ... I don’t think about that word very often. I don’t see it that way. I see it as more like you meet someone, you have some time together and things just move through.”
