A trove of early Coldplay recordings is set for auction this week.
The studio tapes, alternate mixes and demos from the formative sessions that helped shape Coldplay’s debut album, Parachutes, offer a rare glimpse of the band before they achieved worldwide fame.
The bulk of the material comes from British producer, mixer and engineer Chris Allison, and centers on Coldplay’s Blue Room sessions at London’s Orinoco Studios.
The auction house describes the collection as a window into the era that laid the groundwork for Parachutes, including the album track High Speed, a previously unheard take of We Never Change, and a nine-track cassette holding some of the band’s earliest recordings, two of which had never seen release before.
Among the more unusual items, the archive includes an acoustic demo recorded by Chris Martin as a pitch for the title song of the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. The assignment ultimately went to Garbage, whose track became the official Bond theme.
“This collection offers a view into the writing, recording, production and promotion of a handful of distinctly celebrated artists—moments of music history that fans should own rather than let gather dust in a storage unit,” Allison said in a statement.
The Wax Poetics auction runs until Sunday, 19 July.
