On Friday Coldplay performed on the Today Show to promote their new album, Mylo Xyloto. They were impressive and I considered covering that just for the music alone. At this point I’m not a huge Coldplay fan, but I loved their first album and I still have a soft spot for them. They’re talented, they make good music and they can give a hell of a performance. Well we’re into next week now and sure enough there’s a story about Chris Martin behaving like a dick during promotion. It’s well known that he hates to talk about his famous sanctimonious wife, he’s never done a red carpet with her and he once asked a female journalist what her favorite sexual position was when she asked him an innocuous question about whether he’d ever do a duet with Gywneth. Another time, he punched a guy in the chest for mentioning Gwyneth’s ex Brad Pitt. He could just hate to do interviews also, he once walked off a BBC interview when it took at turn he didn’t like. (Which didn’t have anything to do with Goop, supposedly.) It seems like Martin has been softening a little bit on his stance about talking about Gwyneth. In a recent CBS interview, he compared marrying Goop to “winning the lottery.” Well he’s not ready to talk about her much, though. He hung up on a radio interview when they asked him too many questions about her.

This news comes via Lainey Gossip and I had to listen to over 10 minutes of jockey chatter before I got to the heart of the story. I guess four people were on the air asking questions, and a lot of questions were about Gwyneth, since they figured Martin had opened the floodgates already with that CBS interview. Martin let out a sigh and hung up on them during the interview, which was not yet aired and wasn’t live. After he hung up, Martin called back and said that he didn’t object to any particular questions and that it was more about the fact that too many were coming at once. The interviewers thought it did have to do with Gwyneth, though.

There were no restrictions on what we can or cannot ask.

After the interview, we’re all sitting there and we’re shaking our heads after he hangs up on us. We’re all not sure what went wrong here… He calls back, gets his people on the phone…

I said “Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted that this next album is a masterpiece. I said ‘she sort of has to say that right?'”

He hung up, then he called back and asked to talk to him off the air.

He said “I’m just not used to that many people asking me that many questions so quickly. I just was uncomfortable.”

He never said “I didn’t want to talk about Gwyneth… I wasn’t comfortable with the interview,” is what he said.

He was trying to stress that he was overwhelmed by the questions.

He kept saying he wasn’t offended…

He then requested that we not run it. “You don’t have to play that.”

[From audio on The Bert Show]

So what’s going on with this dude? If he doesn’t want to talk about his wife, that should be specified up front. Given his history at freaking out over questions about her, most interviewers should kind of know not to bring it up. I’m not saying he had the right to hang up, just that it’s an obvious sore spot for him. He’s also really touchy. Couldn’t he have just said “one at a time please?”

I’m hoping they release the full interview tomorrow. I’d really like to hear it.

Update: Thanks to Sadie for letting me know the audio of the interview is up. It’s the second audio link on this page and it starts at the 11:00 mark. Chris at first says he’s “not very good at answering these questions,” then when the interviewer asked about Gwyneth tweeting that the album was a masterpiece, around 6:00 in, he lets out a sigh and hangs up. As another DJ mentions, Chris started getting pissy when Goop was mentioned. There weren’t too many questions coming at him per se, it was just too many questions about Gwyneth.

photo credit: WENN.com