Rolling Stone slammed it, but the new Coldplay album has gone straight to the top of the charts around the world. Lyrically it's a lonely yet hopeful album with more than its fair share of spiritual seeking. Not least in the final track 'Til Kingdom Come' penned by Jonny Cash just before he died and never before recorded til now...

 

DID YOU KNOW... The multi-coloured geo-metric artwork on the new Coldplay album uses the Baudot Code, an international telegraphic alphabet that predated the Morse Code. Chris has used the Baudot alphabet to spell X&Y on the front cover & ‘Make Trade Fair’ on the back.

THERE ARE RUMOURS... that the band's drummer Will Champion (far left)may have a Christian faith. What we do know is that lead singer Chris Martin did grow up in a strongly Christian environment - his mother even urged him (unsuccess-fully) to keep himself a virgin until his

eventual marriage to actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Perhaps some of these spiritual conflicts can be heard on the new album, X&Y, not least on the track A Message which appears to rip off an old hymn by the English clergyman Samuel Crossman. Martin's opening lyric goes...

Crossman's hymn of 1664 begins like this:

 

Even the tune mimics the melody of the opening line of the hymn. After that initial 'co-incidence', however, Martin's self-conscious musings on love-lost don't come anywhere near the worshipful splendour of the original. For instance, while Martin pens this meagre offering:

 

that penniless pastor wrote this more than 300 years earlier:

"Here might I stay and sing,
no story so divine:
never was love, dear King,
never was grief like thine.
This is my friend,
in whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend."