Happy Birthday, Chris Martin!

It’s Chris Martin’s birthday! Celebrate the Coldplay frontman’s 41st birthday with these ten super fun kaleidoscopic facts!

1. Martin met his fellow band mates while attending University College London, where he studied Ancient World Studies. He graduated with honours in both Greek and Latin.

2. Before settling on a band name, the group called themselves Pectoralz and Starfish. They inherited Coldplay from a fellow musician who was over it.

3. William Willet, the man who campaigned and made daylight savings a recognized practice, was Martin’s great-great-grandfather.

4. Martin calls U2 one of his biggest influences, writing in Rolling Stone, “I don’t buy weekend tickets to Ireland and hang out in front of their gates, but U2 are the only band whose entire catalogue I know by heart. The first song on The Unforgettable Fire, “A Sort of Homecoming”. It’s one of the first songs I played to my unborn baby.”

5. He’s also said that he’d give would give his “left ball to write anything as good as (Radiohead’s) OK Computer.”

6. Martin admits that Coldplay’s “Shiver” is a respectful rip off of Jeff Buckley’s “Grace”.

7. He and band mate Johnny Buckland made a cameo in Shaun of the Dead as the fictional charity ZombieAid. Martin later came back as a zombie.

8. Shaun of the Dead writer and actor Simon Pegg is godfather to Martin and Gwenyth Paltrow’s daughter Apple. Martin is Pegg’s daughter’s godfather.

9. In 2017, he performed a piano rendition of Linkin Park’s “Crawling” at Chester Bennington’s funeral.

10. He was named PETA’s Sexiest Vegetarian in 2005. Although he continued to be vegetarian following the honour, he began eating meat shortly after his unconcious uncoupling with Gwenyth Paltrow.

Happy birthday, Chris!