If you’ve been to a Coldplay concert this year chances are you’ve seen singer Chris Martin sing a duet with a spacey puppet named Angel Moon. She’s the rainbow haired lead singer of the all-felt band The Weirdos — a creation of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop — and because Martin and his bandmates are magnanimous and support up-and-coming musical acts, they were all on hand this week to watch the Weirdos sign to Atlantic Records.
“The Weirdos are a band who we’re trying to help out,” explained Martin to Billboard recently during a backstage chat just before the band’s first of two sold-out nights at Chicago’s Soldier Field. With a mischievous, knowing grin, Martin explained that it’s really “Bruno [Mars] and Ed [Sheeran]’s label,” maybe Dua Lipa or Cardi B’s, but also Coldplay’s label. And now the Weirdos, too.
A team player all the way, Martin will help the band of furry freaks make their network TV debut on Friday night’s (June 10) Tonight Show, where the group will jam with him on “Biutyful” from Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres album.
“They have one song at the moment [‘Biutyful’] and we’re on it with them,” Martin continued before taking a brief time out to question if the way he was describing this intergalactically weird off-shoot of the Music of the Spheres universe was making any sense. What is most definitely true is that Angel Moon has been singing a duet of “Biutyful” with Martin on the tour, performing to more than a million people so far across the band’s Latin American and U.S. dates over the past 3 months according to Coldplay’s label.
Even as he tried to toe the story’s carefully crafted line, Martin couldn’t help but crack himself up as he navigated the ornate narrative turns. “The way I discovered them was we were working with Angel Moon, this lady… creature,” the singer said as guitarist Jonny Buckland stifled a laugh while sitting on a green room couch in the bowels of the Bears’ stadium as he watched his old friend try to explain the weirdness.
“How do I explain this? I think we just felt like…” Martin continued, careful to not blow the surprise or tip his hand, while also earnestly wanting to explain why he’s been singing with a gnome-like puppet on stage during the band’s carefully choreographed, low-emission global tour that has seen recent cameos from Lupe Fiasco, Kylie Minogue and Bruce Springsteen.
Regardless, Moon and her bandmates — Donk, Sparkman and The Wizard — will rock the Tonight Show after the band signed a “historic” contract with Atlantic and Parlophone Records on Tuesday. According to a release announcing the unusual deal, their manager, Bruce Cakemix, described the deal as “the biggest step forward in human-alien relations since Close Encounters.”
“I think we thought that we’ve sort of come to the end of doing singles as Coldplay. I think we’ve probably basically finished doing that, in general. We can’t go more poppier or single-y [than the Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 BTS collaboration “My Universe”] than that and that felt good and we’re a bit older now. So we do have songs we want to bring some attention to, but with this we asked the Weirdoes if they would do the song and front it and we would feature.”
According to Martin, some people say the Weirdos are from another planet, and some say, “there’s a room in Los Angeles where all of the rejected puppets live and they maybe come from there.”
