The Coldplay Classic That Started as a Neil Young Impression and Ended With an Angry Noel Gallagher

Inspiration often comes from the strangest places, which is how a Neil Young impression turned into what would become a bona fide Coldplay classic, scoring the band their first top five hit in their native U.K. It was clear to the band’s contemporaries that songwriter Chris Martin had struck gold, even causing Oasis’ Noel Gallagher to get jealous that he didn’t think of it first.

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Of course, Gallagher thinking of the song’s opening line first would have been impossible unless the “Wonderwall” primary songwriter had been in the Wales countryside with Coldplay one fateful, starry night.

Making The Best Out Of A Boring Studio Break

As anyone who has recorded an album can attest, studio time can involve a lot of waiting around. Equipment goes down, musicians and engineers need breaks to stay sharp, sometimes one member of the band will need significantly more time to record their parts than the others. Whatever the reason, recording sessions can come with plenty of “hurry up and wait” moments. Coldplay found themselves in one such moment after a microphone started glitching before singer Chris Martin was going to cut his vocals. While waiting for the engineers to fix the problem, the band stepped outside into the cool night air.

Coldplay was recording their debut album, Parachutes, at a residential recording studio in Wales called Rockfield. The rural location of the studio meant that there were plenty of stars to admire in the night sky. “It was so beautiful outside,” Martin recalled to Guitar Player. “All four of us were outside, and Ken [Nelson, producer], he was like, ‘Look up there, lads! Look at the stars. He literally said, ‘Look at the stars,’ which is the first line of that song.” (For those who didn’t spend the early 2000s melodramatically listening to Coldplay, the song Martin was describing is “Yellow,” which begins, Look at the stars, look how they shine for you and everything that you do, it was all yellow.)

When the band went back inside, they still had to wait a little bit longer for the engineers to fix the technical issues. So, Martin picked up his acoustic guitar and started singing the phrase Nelson had said while admiring the night sky. In an attempt to entertain the band, Martin leaned into the hard “r” of stars in a high, nasally voice à la Neil Young.

A Neil Young Impression Turned Into A Coldplay Classic

Although Chris Martin might have started singing what would become their first top five hit in the U.K. to make the rest of his band “giggle,” but the rest of the song fell out naturally. The Coldplay frontman told Howard Stern he finished the song in about ten minutes and decided to add it to Parachutes, the album they were recording at Rockfield. The last-minute decision proved to be a fortuitous career move. “Yellow” skyrocketed the band to international fame as the song peaked at No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard Adult Alternative Songs chart, No. 4 in Scotland, No. 1 in Iceland, and No. 5 in Australia.

Coldplay’s contemporaries took notice, too. Speaking to Pitchfork in 2011, Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher said, “When I heard “Yellow” for the first time, I immediately picked up the guitar and went, ‘F***ing b******s. Why didn’t I write that? I feel that way about a lot of their songs.”

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