Chris Martin: ‘I starred in a musical… but I couldn’t sing!’

Rocker Chris Martin was once told not to sing after landing a role in a stage production of musical My Fair Lady.
The Grammy-winning musician has won countless fans the world over thanks to his distinctive voice and powerful lyrics, but the Coldplay star hasn’t always tasted musical success.
“I was an absolute a**ehole,” he grinned on U.S. talk show Conan as he recalled what he was like as a youngster. “I was just doing my best… I really fell in love with music, I tried sports.
“For a time I wanted to be in musical theatre, but I did one audition which didn’t go so well, because I couldn’t dance, and then I got one part in a musical but they said, ‘You can’t sing’. There was a musical of My Fair Lady, the Pretty Woman story of Eliza Doolittle, and I auditioned and they said, ‘Great, you’ve got the part, but we don’t want you to do a song. Just come on and be Eliza’s dad.'”
In the tale, Alfred is a dustman and like his daughter, played by Audrey Hepburn in the 1964 film, has a strong Cockney accent, which Chris picked up for his portrayal. Quizzing his host on whether he can speak the vernacular, Conan admitted he’s been fascinated by it since watching Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney character in Mary Poppins, although his own impression is “horrible”.
To the delight of the audience, the pair then decided to perform a Cockney rendition of Coldplay’s hit song Yellow, complete with flat caps and fingers under their collars. And when Conan began to broach the subject of the group’s new album, Chris joked, “You don’t have to do that,” instead suggesting: “Let’s do our own album of Conan and Chris’ Cockney Classics!”