
He left Aston with a factory worker’s vowels and returned as the voice that helped give heavy metal its shape. Between those two points came reinvention, family television, festival economics and one final, wonderfully circular night at Villa Park.
Four students found one another in London, survived their own earnestness and turned private yearning into a public utility. Nearly three decades later, Coldplay's brightest trick is still collective: make the enormous feel oddly intimate.