Music Video: Strawberry Swing by Coldplay

Now that they’ve become one of the world’s most famous bands, Coldplay are no longer receiving the creative plaudits they deserve. Their music, still imbued with those triumphant choruses which catapulted them into stardom, may have become more popular than even the band themselves could’ve imagined, but the brilliance of Coldplay’s videos remains thoroughly impressive. The simple but fantastic video for   Yellow from their hugely successful (and to my mind still their best) album Parachutes filmed lead singer Chris Martin on a beach in England, singing his wonderfully tender tune as the sky goes from pre-dawn light to sunshine, the setting fitting the tune perfectly.

With the video for Strawberry Swing, one of the singles from 2008 album Viva La Vida, the group have again made Martin the protagonist. Enacting a dramatic, fantastical adventure against a chalk-drawn background, the singer’s terrific vocals swell and ebb in harmony with the quite brilliant animations in the background. Director Shynola has made an indelible piece here, utilising a broad spectrum of colours and settings to mirror the track’s quite marvellous build-up and finale, Martin’s tender but powerful voice declaring “The sky could be blue, I don’t mind, without you it’s waste of time”.

One of the more notable and memorable videos of the last few years, ‘Strawberry Swing’ shows that being a hugely successful band doesn’t always translate into creative stagnation.

Luke Grundy is a fervent assimilator of media living amid the bright lights of London, England. If he’s not watching films or listening to music, he’s probably asleep, eating or dead. An aspiring writer, journalist and musician, he is the creator of movie/music blog Odessa & Tucson and lives for epistemology.