Two memorable bands of my childhood and the Noughties are Coldplay and Dandy Warhols. The reader is probably thinking these two bands go together a bit strangely. Very few people haven’t heard of Coldplay but Dandy Warhols are much less played and well known. The original reason I listened to both these bands was my best friend of primary school and early high school loved these bands so this post is as much about him as it is about the music. I think the reason he liked Coldplay was because his family liked it, and I think the reason he liked the Dandy Warhols was because his Dad liked it.

Perhaps another reason these two bands are memorable is I liked them at a time before Youtube and streaming. At the time people around me had no access to the internet and even if they had I don’t think music was being played from the internet in the noughties at least until a bit later in the decade. The way to listen was to borrow the physical CD and put it in your computer in the disk drive at your house and then what’s called ‘rip’ the music onto your computer. CD’s of course usually came in the form of albums (or compilations). You could then put it on an MP3 player (or burn it to a blank CD) and listen to it as much as you liked. This way a single CD could be listened to by lots of people in a friend group. 

Looking back it was a time when I didn’t have much exposure to music. There was the charts (which you heard in Woolworths for example), there was my Dad and there was my best friend. I think overall the influence was quite one way, my friend influenced my tastes and he didn’t seem much influenced by my tastes. I didn’t mind of course. 

At that time if you heard a song when you were out and about there wasn’t even Shazam (the mobile app) or Google to look up the lyrics so you’d have to ask the staff (for the track name) or most often you’d not learn it at all.

Anyway unlike in 2025 when most people just listen to the single tracks from Spotify or Apple Music and forget about the album, in the Noughties I listened to every track on the ‘X&Y’ (Coldplay), ‘Rush of Blood to the Head’ (Coldplay), ‘Parachutes’ (Coldplay), ‘Viva la Vida’ (Coldplay). Also in the albums ‘Thirteen Tales from Urban Suburbia’ (Dandy Warhols). 

To be honest I don’t spend a lot of time listening to these bands nowadays due to such a huge variety and such huge quality of music on Spotify today but whenever I listen to some of the lesser known tracks from ‘Viva La Vida’ for example I think of that period and my (then) best friend.

One of the most notable is ‘Life in Technicolour pt 2’ from ‘Viva La Vida’ which is quite a beautiful track which I am listening to as I write this blog post. Other notable tracks are ‘In My Place’ and ‘Daylight’ from ‘Rush of Blood to the Head,’ ‘Trouble’ from ‘Parachutes,’ ‘Death and All his Friends’ from ‘Viva La Vida.’ Dandy Warhols had such classics as ‘Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth’ and ‘Bohemian Like You’ and ‘Godless.’ At that age I didn’t take the lyrics particularly seriously.

Because one was much more limited by the music one could access or afford (as a child/early teenager), one would listen to the same tracks many times more probably than would be typical nowadays. One only had a few hundred tracks or less on the MP3 and less than 20 typically on your average CD. So it wasn’t like today where you can listen to any track in existence at any time, on your smartphone, with a Spotify subscription, with internet access.