Chris Martin dashes our hopes

With his talk of Coldplay needing to call it a day by the age of 33, Chris Martin held out the prospect of a day in the near future where the world might no longer live in fear of heavy-handed imagery and mild hypocrisy in the form of Coldplay albums.

It's a dream that Martin has killed:

"We're proceeding as if it's our last because it's the only way to proceed.

"You've got to have deadlines, you know. What that means is we're going to pour everything we can into next year and not think beyond that. We always say that and we always mean it. But every time we say it, someone writes that it's over.

"I don't think we'll ever split up but we have to do a lot before we're 33."

Who would have thought that Martin and his team lived on some sort of 'live every day as if it was your last' motto, as if their entire worldview was forged in the Motivational Posters section of a bookstore.

But we have it from his own lips: he can't imagine a world in which Coldplay would not be churning out record after record of polite corner music. Forever. A barren bunker under the Rockies suddenly looks more attractive, doesn't it?