Cold mine

IT’S become fashionable for so-called music fans to dislike COLDPLAY.

But that means there are 500,000 uncool people in the UK alone who have rushed out to buy the band’s latest album Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends in the last fortnight.

And I am not ashamed to be included in the figures.

For every diehard Coldplay fan there’s someone else who can’t stand them — but the band are now in some illustrious company.

They have claimed the ultra-rare honour of scoring a No1 in the single and album charts on both sides of the Atlantic — putting them alongside musical greats including THE BEATLES in terms of transatlantic success.

It’s an incredible achievement in a climate of tumbling record sales and an industry reported to be in catastrophic decline.

The last British act to achieve the “double double” was ROD STEWART back in 1971.

The Scots rocker topped the charts with single Maggie May and album Every Picture Tells A Story.

Now CHRIS MARTIN, GUY BERRYMAN, JONNY BUCKLAND and WILL CHAMPION can add the huge international triumph to their bulging CV.

It’s incredible to think only eight years ago Coldplay were belting out their set as a warm-up act for Ocean Colour Scene.

Now the band can afford to lavish £900,000 on spherical video screens for their forthcoming tour and each member is reported to be worth £25million.

Coldplay have embraced the challenges facing the music industry and harnessed the power of the internet.

The proof of that is in their chart-topping single Viva La Vida — long live life in Spanish — which has hit the top spot on downloads alone.

Their album has had online success too with the iTunes pre-order being the biggest in its history.

And physical copies of the album from high street shop HMV were their highest ever pre-order too.

It is the band’s fastest-selling album to date and has already been certified double platinum.

HMV’s Gennaro Castaldo said: “The interest we have seen in Viva La Vida has been truly phenomenal — both online, where we’ve taken the most amount of pre-orders for an album ever, and also across all our stores, for which we placed one of the largest orders in our company’s history.

“So while many more of us are downloading, this clearly shows that the music-loving public still love their CDs.”

The boys showcased tracks from Viva La Vida — the band’s fourth studio album — at an open-air concert live on BBC2 last week.

The album sold 302,000 copies after only three days on sale.

And in its second week on UK shop shelves a further 197,000 copies were flogged — taking the tally just shy of 500,000.

If the doom and gloom of the record industry was to be believed these kind of figures were a thing of the past.

But unlike a lot of their cool contemporaries — including OASIS and BLUR — the key to Coldplay’s huge success has been cracking the US market.

Last night the band landed No1 in the American Billboard 200.

It’s only the second time Coldplay have made the Top 10 of the singles chart in the US — Speed of Sound reached No8 in 2005.

Their No1 in the US single charts is the first by a British group since THE SPICE GIRLS 11 years ago.

The lads have also flogged 700,000 copies of their album in the States.

And the impressive statistics don’t stop there.

Coldplay are now No1 in 14 countries around the world, including Australia, Japan, Korea, Germany and Israel.

In record company speak, they have conquered all the vital territories — Japan, America and Europe.

If that’s uncool, then I’m happy to be part of Chris Martin’s geeky gang.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/article1336956.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=coldplay