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BUSINESS TIMES
AUGUST 3, 2001
Executive Lifestyle
Turning on the heat
It was a night of underwear flinging at Coldplay and Travis' concert, reports Hwee Hwee Tan

After watching Coldplay in concert last Sunday, one marvels how four nondescript men can inspire so much underwear flinging. Judging from the screaming hordes that leapt off their hundred dollar seats to throw bras at Chris Martin, you would expect the frontman to have the pin-up looks of a Robbie Williams, but Martin looks merely like the kind of plain bloke you'd bump into at a college hall of residence, a muso whose life revolves around Radiohead, Aristotle and instant noodles.

With his shaven head and crumpled shirt, Martin probably doesn't look too different from what he was five years ago - an earnest Ancient History student at University College, London. It's surprising that the band dismissed by Alan McGee (ex-Creation Records honcho and Oasis star-maker) as a 'bunch of bedwetters who care more about passing their exams' are in Singapore stirring girls into a storm of sexual frenzy.

Coldplay started the concert with the wistful Shiver, where Martin lamented that 'I look in your direction/but you pay me no attention'. It's typical New Miserabilist stuff, and the guitar band strummed out their angst anthems with minimal showmanship. There were no costume changes and no dancing. Buckland, Champion and Berryman just stood there playing their instruments, still and stoic, like students waiting in line to buy tickets for the Arsenal-Spurs derby at Highbury.

Martin seemed determined to make up for the po-faced performance of his colleagues by bouncing across the stage like it was made from spongy floorboards. The British band eschewed all the conventional niceties of a pop show. It's customary, one supposes, to tell the audience how great they've been and Martin gave this rock concert convention a cheeky twist by telling the 6,000 fans at the Singapore Indoor Stadium that - 'we've had a very good time in Singapore even though it's as hot as f----'.

That was typically Coldplay. They weren't interested in prancing around in fancy costumes or making pleasant chit-chat with their groupies. Like true musos, they believed that only the Music matters and that was all they were here to do - just get on stage and play the Music.

Spellbinding aura
And their Music was utterly entrancing. From the desolate piano hook of Trouble to the rippling riffs of Don't Panic, Coldplay wove a spellbinding aura of melancholia. Martin's cherubic voice was a revelation, rising like a celestial chime, especially in Yellow, where his falsetto soared heavenwards, telling you to 'look at the stars, see how they shine for you/And everything you do/Yeah, they were all yellow'.

After Coldplay's exit, Travis came on stage and were greeted with even more enthusiastic bouts of undie throwing. Like Martin, the gangly Fran Healy didn't look like your typical sex symbol, but charmed the crowd with the sensitive earnestness that he's probably had since the days he was a student at the Glasgow School of Art.

Starting their gig with Sing, the shiny-faced quartet swirled out a sugary set, complete with folksy strings, orchestral swells and the occasional banjo. Fran Healy chatted merrily with the crowd between each song, charming with his lilting Scottish brogue.

Before playing The Cage, he explained that he wrote this song after he was chucked by his girlfriend and feeling 'utterly devastated' when his mother told him that love was like a bird - 'if you let it go, it will come back to you. But if it doesn't, it was never yours in the first place'. Oh dear. A rock-and-roll riffster who takes love advice from his Ma? Sounds dangerously Forrest Gump-ish, but Healy himself admits that Travis' appeal comes from the 'Stupid Factor' and it's this dose of self-conscious irony that saves boozy howlers like All I Want To Do is Rock ('I'm a foot without a sock without you').

But still, with the international success of books like Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, there's evidence that the new sex icon for the millennium will be the SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy), the rock geek who charms with his naive naffness.

Though Coldplay and Travis' core fan base may mainly be made up of tertiary students on Prozac, judging from the enthusiastic crowd at the Singapore Indoor Stadium - an eclectic mix of teenagers, young expatriates and forty-something executives - these Brit-poppers have managed to come up with catchy, hypnotic sets that appeal even to people who think that Plato is Mickey Mouse's dog.

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