People still can’t comprehend that Coldplay’s The Scientist was actually sung backwards
Chris Martin had to learn to sing Coldplay’s 2002 song The Scientist backwards for the sake of the smash-hit’s music video
It was one of the biggest pop culture bombshells of the noughties - and no, we’re not talking about Brad and Jen’s split or the release of the iPod.
We’re talking about Chris Martin revealing he had to learn to sing Coldplay’s 2002 song The Scientist backwards for the sake of the smash-hit’s music video.
Reverse motion was used for the music video, meaning Martin had to learn how to sing the lyrics backwards, which still blows people’s minds to this day.
Watch Martin singing backwards below:
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The video’s director Jamie Thraves explained to MTV back in 2003 that he wanted to riff off the lyric ‘back to the start’, which is why he used reverse motion to move Martin back to the scene of the car crash that killed his on-screen girlfriend.
Footage of a noughties interview in which Martin demonstrates his new-found ability to sing backwards has been doing the social media rounds, and people are just as impressed as ever.
Beneath the clip, one person wrote: “Damn, the dedication to have learned the whole song backwards just to bring that idea to fruition! Must have taken weeks of trial and error. Mad respect.”
Another person added: “Wow, never seen anything about him singing it in reverse before!” while a third penned: “I mean, he can even sing his songs backwards, so beat that every other celebrities.”
“You know you really love your own songs when you can sing them backwards,” wrote a fourth YouTuber, with a fifth adding: “Blown away.”
Speaking about the video to MTV nearly two decades ago, Thraves said: “I had this idea that I wanted to do a story that's tragic but starts off happy and ends happy, and the video is about rewinding to that happy ending.”
He added: "The original idea was a straight narrative without the lead singer in the video.
"But Chris wanted to be in the video and he was really excited to learn how to sing the song backward.”
Thraves went on: "He got a tape of the song recorded backward and he listened to it over and over. He's a very passionate guy, so he got really into it.
“What we learned later on is about the problems with phonetics, because you have to be very careful with the lip movement so that when you end on a sound your mouth is formed in the right way."
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Aisha Nozari