Is Chris pop's new oddest man out?
Coldplay man beats even Jacko in the wacko stakes. By Ed Power
Chris Martin of Coldplay
Chris Martin has been hard at work lately cementing his credentials as the oddest man in pop (with Michael Jackson last spotted skulking around the depths of Bahrain, the crown is evidently there for the taking).
First, the Coldplay frontman started wittering on about making his own clothes for the band's recent photoshoots. Next, he briefly walked out of a BBC interview following some intense grilling about... well, Coldplay's new album, Viva La Vida (the title, the interviewer had suggested, sounded a bit like Viva la Diva, a tour by Welsh singer Katherine Jenkins -- prompting Martin's temporary exit).
Still, the singer faces a stern challenge if he truly hopes to join the ranks of the entertainment world's foremost eccentrics. Certainly, he has some way to go before rivaling Reykjavik pop pixie Bjork, who once turned up at the Oscars in a dress shaped like a dead swan and, after a row with the film director Lars von Trier, is reported to have started to eat her own clothes (we haven't even touched on her music, which is chiefly concerned with polar bears and moths).
How much of a kook is Bjork? Ask the news reporter who found himself having his head slammed repeatedly off the floor after daring to ask her a question about her daughter.
No less bizarre is the behaviour of Prince, who has not only gone through several name changes but also converted so devotedly to the Jehovah's Witness faith that he is said to have arrived at the doorstep of a Jewish family on the hebrew feast of Yom Kippur and bent their ears for 25 minutes (short of setting the dogs loose, how do you get rid of a pop star who wants to lecture you about God?).
Some people are born eccentric but then there are those who have eccentricity thrust upon them, largely as a result of their prodigious substance abuse. Consider Ozzy Osbourne, who grew up a respectable lad from the English midlands but, at the height of his fame, lived a life of debauched oddity worthy of a TV3 true life movie.
His most bizarre jinks are well documented -- such as the time he snapped off a bat's head with his teeth during a concert. But, even in private Osbourne's peculiar streak knew no limits: according to Neil Strauss' 2001 Motley Crue biography, The Dirt, Osbourne was once so out of it on a US tour that he snorted a line of ants.
Not to be outdone by his old drinking partner, the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards last year claimed to have snorted his father's ashes. Such was the furore he later retracted the statement, though we are still left with a hefty war-chest of 'mad Keef' yarns, such as the apocryphal tale of him turning up at a Swiss clinic to have every drop of (drug-laced) blood in his body replaced with that of a healthy person, so that he could enter the US legally.
For proper, eye-popping weirdness, though, we need look to only one place: Hollywood. An industry that thrives on illusion, where A-listers are shielded from the everyday world and pampered to a truly absurd degree, cinema has naturally proved a fertile source of bonkers behaviour. You will, of course, know all about Tom Cruise's infamous appearance on Oprah, where he delivered a convincing impersonation of one of the apes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Bounding around the sofa, Cruise, who has always had an eerie twinkle in his eye, declared himself hopelessly in love with actress Katie Holmes -- a declaration that might have been easier to take at face value had he not been swinging off the furniture and hooting at the time.
You could argue that Cruise's outburst harmed his standing as matinee idol (wild speculation that he and Holmes were trying to keep their newborn daughter Suri hidden after her birth didn't help). No such unfortunate consequences have blighted the career of Angelina Jolie, however.
When she's not being snapped with Brad Pitt on the red carpet or adopting infants from south east Asia (she has three to date), Jolie, it appears, enjoys nothing more than living up to her reputation as a first- rate kook.
On a recent visit to department store Macy's, for example, the actress is said to have disappeared into a dressing room with a stack of towels so she could 'try them out'.
It's easy to giggle at such antics. But perhaps we scoff too readily. For instance, would Britney Spears have shaved her head in public in 2007 had she been just another vaguely trashy unknown from the American heartland?
Does fame attract the naturally eccentric or does it transform the previously normal into bonkers parodies of their former selves?
The next time you hear of Chris Martin having some sort of geek-boy meltdown in public, ask yourself who among us would fare any better in his situation?
The Recession: have you a mortgage heartbreak? Tell us your story by contacting Nicola at nanderson@independent.ie
- Ed Power
