From the archives: Consciously uncoupling myself from Coldplay

As traumatic experiences go, this has got to rank up there with mislaying your house keys or losing your mum in the supermarket. There’s a high likelihood that I could be scarred for life.  I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m not going to insult your intelligence by dressing it up: I found a Coldplay single in my record collection. Yep. There it was, nestled between Cold Water Flat and Collapsed Lung (Google ‘em both), just waiting to be found at an opportune moment.

I took some consolation from two facts: firstly, it came free with an issue of NME back in 2008, so I didn’t pay for it as such and, secondly, I’ve never actually listened to it. I must have removed it from the cover of said magazine all those years ago, filed it away (alphabetically, of course) and forgotten about it.

Unearthing it after six apparently Coldplay-free years brought up a lot of feelings – guilt, anger, shame, disappointment. How had I let my guard down so spectacularly? How could I look people in the eye again? How could I even step out of the house in the morning?

Thankfully, the solution came to me quicker than you can say ‘conscious uncoupling’.

What follows is a handy step-by-step guide to purging unwanted pests of the Chris Martin variety:

1. Remove the offending record from your collection. Gaze upon it briefly to ensure it is indeed a Coldplay record and not something worth keeping. I checked Discogs to ensure that it wasn’t valuable and therefore worth selling. Thankfully, it was only worth £1.79 (less than I paid for the magazine, I think) so I could proceed with my original plan.

2. Take a bowl – ideally one that the record is too big to fit inside. You may gaze upon the bowl too if you wish but a bowl’s a bowl, so don’t waste valuable purgin’ time.

3. Place the Coldplay record on top of the bowl in the sink and boil the kettle. Once boiled, pour the contents of the kettle onto the record.

4. Bearing in mind boiling water and human fingers don’t really mix, use your fingers (or another suitable appendage/implement) to push what should now be a very soft record into the bowl, so that it bunches up (alternatively, you could push another similar-sized bowl down on top of it to make, um, another bowl, but I didn’t think of this until afterwards).

5. Hey presto! You’ve made a nifty piece of modern art, which already serves more purpose in this fetid existence than anything Chris Martin has ever emitted from his self-righteous face hole.

6. Take comfort in the fact that there is now one less playable Coldplay record in the world. That’s one less person suffering. You’ve done something amazing today. This also works with anything by Bastille, by the way.

It’s taken a lot of courage to share this, but I don’t want others going through similar experiences to think they are suffering alone. I’m in your corner. 

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on June 5, 2014.