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And Finally Artist News
James turned down Coldplay
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 23 January 2009
Blur’s Alex James has told The Sun how, while dabbling in the world of record label management in the 90s, he turned down the chance of signing Coldplay because he found their music “ordinary”.
He was forgetting, of course, that there’s a lot of money in the ordinary. And the dull. And the tediously mediocre. Well, there is in the ordinary, dull, tediously mediocre Coldplay anyway.
James told the tab: “I went to see Coldplay with Damien Hirst and Joe Strummer – my fellow record company executives – and we all thought they were ordinary and passed on them. I think everyone did, except Parlophone”.
He admitted that the A&R haggle often initially consider the big bands of the future as being “too ordinary” to sign, adding that it was only Parlophone who spotted the potential in The Beatles, and even his own band Blur.
Though he adds: “Then again, I still think Coldplay are a fairly ordinary band, although the singer is good”. Good at what he failed to elaborate.
