‘Lost’ is the stand-out tune on this Coldplay record – rhythmic, rolling, anarchic, flying under the pop radar – and best captures a purple patch in Lockdown spent intensely knocking out my new book ‘The Soul Asylums’.
Exiled on suburban street, I would plug myself into the ‘Vida La Vida’ stream, find a shady spot in the bricked corner of the garden, and burn the words from brain to phone, as Martin sung of being ‘lost’ in time, space, and the greater universe.
Somehow, inexplicably, Coldplay was like rocket fuel on this solo mission to mine, liberate, and archive the deep buried memories of my troubled past, and a guilt-free creative pleasure to escape from the sweating stresses of the raging pandemic and its deadly global wave.
Wading up to my waist through a stagnant swamp when I purchased this record, I was drinking muddy waters from the stagnant wells of life. Sick of chasing away demons, this remains a dark chapter never forgotten, and the record fell into my hands when I was googling a painless death on the internet.
‘Vida la Vida or Death and all his Friends’ lived an unloved, un-played and lonely existence, abandoned to gather dust, on the hidden top shelf of my record rack. And the abandoned record became a to-be-discovered classic that ultimately found the needle groove in the better tomorrow’s that eventually washed onto these shores.
Unearthed over a decade later – as the mercury thermometers rose in Lockdown, boxing up old records for attic storage – Coldplay took me on a haunting flight over the cemeteries of London, over its spectral vintage rooftops, all the time hinting at glory for dead souls of the revolution. All kissed with the magic synth dust of Brian Eno. A timeless classic for the ages.