The Jesus of Uncool

There's not that much difference, come to think of it.
But it was too much for those guys. So I said, "I've got this song I wrote, we could do that instead." I think a lot of musicians who write their own stuff, it comes from the fact that they're not very good at doing covers. From that point on, I was in a bunch of bands. Identity Crisis, another one called Floating Insomnia. And then I was in a band called the Rocking Honkies, which was like a white blues band. Being in that blues band was the best educator. Often the best songs have, like, one chord in them. So I got to be the piano player for "Mustang Sally" and songs like that.

In Coldplay's early music, there was a lot of soul singing in your voice.
That was probably soul, but through Jeff Buckley's filter, to be ruthlessly honest. Before that, I spent three years trying to sound like Eddie Vedder.

When you were 13, your parents sent you to boarding school. What was that like?
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." It felt like there must be more to life than rugby and cheap cider on the weekends.

You're on record as saying that you didn't lose your virginity until you were 22.
Which record? I think I'm on all our records saying that [laughs].

But why the wait?
Well, there were religious issues and shit like that. Also confidence. I had a tricky time with girls until I was, like, 21. I'm sure it's always tricky, but I didn't quite have it down. I've always had a lot of female friends.

You got trapped in the friend zone.
I got trapped in the friendship tip many, many times. It was like, "I need to be a rock star, because this is no good: being the kind of guy that everybody likes but no one wants to have sex with." I don't want to be the person that makes everyone laugh before they go off and bang. I want to be the guy that everybody bangs. So all these little things accumulate to just give you little bits of drive.

You're a big fan of Woody Allen's movies. Was part of the attraction seeing that a neurotic guy can get impossibly beautiful women?
Yeah, and he was right. Even I am evidence of that.