Coldplay

Coldplay may have started out as slavish Radiohead copyists – frontman Chris Martin once banned the rest of the band from taking cocaine because he heard that's what Thom Yorke had done – but they’ve long since eclipsed their heroes in terms of commercial success. With album sales to date topping 30 million, Chris Martin and co. are the quintessential Noughties rock band, as well as that rare thing: a British act who have conquered America.

With their stadium-ready sound – a sleek fusion of icy guitar atmospherics, insistent piano riffs, plus a lyrical mood of non-specific emotional turmoil – acting as a template for a whole generation of emotionally fragile balladeers (Keane, Snow Patrol, The Fray et al), Coldplay’s influence is inescapable.

The foursome formed in London in 1997, calling themselves Pectoralz and Starfish before eventually settling on Coldplay - a name discarded by fellow University College London student Tim Rice-Oxley, who had renamed his band Keane.

Debut album ‘Parachutes’, released in 1999, was initially a slow-burner. It took the release of the ballad ‘Yellow’ the following year to thrust Coldplay into the mainstream. But it was second album ‘A Rush Of Blood To The Head’, released in August 2002, that sent them stratospheric, with propulsive anthems such as ‘Clocks’ signalling a desire to inherit U2’s enormo-rock crown.

2005’s 8.5 million-selling ‘X&Y’ replicated the sales success, if not quite the breathless critical reception, of ‘A Rush Of Blood To The Head’, leading to a period of self-examination (guitarist Jonny Buckland has called ‘X&Y’ “flabby”). Consequently, fourth album ‘Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends’ finds the band toning down key elements of their trademark sound, not least Martin’s pleading falsetto, which makes way for a deeper, more strident vocal tone, as demonstrated by the Oasis-style stomp of ‘Violet Hill’, which was given away as a free 7” with NME in May 2008.