Parachutes

Coldplay planned to record the album in two weeks, but tours stretched the work from November 1999 to May 2000. Ken Nelson, who was offered the job on a night when the band rushed through a tense Liverpool set, had them learn each song as a live piece and settle on a tempo so that they would calm down. Most of it was made at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool, a lot of it in the upstairs project studio, which Nelson called basically a demo room. Spies was started at Rockfield in Wales. Nelson recorded to analogue two-inch tape, left much of it uncompressed, and said most of Martin's vocals were one take. The mixing was done in New York by Michael Brauer, apart from High Speed, which Chris Allison produced and mixed alone. The cover is a photograph of a yellow globe taken with a disposable Kodak camera. The album is dedicated to Sara Champion, the mother of the drummer Will Champion, who died in May 2000.

It entered the UK chart at number one with 70,935 copies and is certified 9x Platinum for 2.7 million copies. In the US it peaked at 51 on the Billboard 200 after American labels turned the band down and Nettwerk released it there in November 2000. It won the Brit Award for British Album of the Year in 2001 and the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. Rolling Stone's Matt Diehl wrote that it rises above its influences to become a work of real transcendence. Pitchfork's reviewer found it generic and named Shiver as the only truly decent song. In 2002 Petridis called it certainly no masterpiece but said it had one fantastic single, Yellow. A hidden track, Life Is for Living, follows Everything's Not Lost. Four singles were released: Shiver, Yellow, Trouble and Don't Panic, the last in Europe only.