It’s hard to perfect a happy song. Pharrell managed it. Stevie Wonder managed it. Bill Withers managed it. I haven’t managed it yet. - Chris Martin

To be a frontman you have to be half very driven and half a total knob. I like to think I'm both.

I don’t think being 13 to 15 is an easy time for any boy. It’s like a big puberty race, and if you’re coming in last, it’s not such a great race to be in. I was a hyper-religious, quite naive and very judgmental kid. I was unpopular for three years, and then it all kind of switched when I was 16. But I had already been marked with the “I’m going to fucking get out of here and show you bastards what’s what” tag. So I’m very grateful for that period of challenge between 13 and 16, facing the blinkeredness of that kind of schoolboy mentality of, like, “You’re gay, you’re bad at sports, you’re this, you’re that.” Because it did make me think: “I don’t want to end up in some bank, where I’m going to have to take this kind of shit off these same people for the rest of my life. I need to get out of this fucking treadmill 'public school, into university, into a bank, into a summer house in France'.”

Being nice is a lot easier when you're loaded. Of course I can be a bastard, but it doesn't make me feel as good as not being one. What I'm saying is, sometimes people think you're nicer than you are just because you've got loads of money and you can pay for things.