Coldplay connection 25 years in the making

It’s 25 years since Nelson man Mike Beever produced, mixed, and even played on Coldplay’s first EP - and now he and his family have just had a once-in-a-lifetime experience meeting the band.

It was a wet Easter weekend in 1999 when Mike, who was working as a recording engineer in London at the time, recorded tracks for the relatively unknown band.

“They came into the studio and the record company [Fierce Panda] said, ‘We’ve got this band coming in. We think they’re going to be big’. Of course, they said that about most bands.”

Fast-forward to 2024, and Mike was reunited with the now-huge band at one of their Auckland shows earlier this month, with his wife Lucy, daughter Ellie, 16, and son Theo, 13 - who walked away wearing singer Chris Martin’s hat.

With over 100 million albums sold worldwide, Coldplay is one of the best-selling music acts of all time, and their three Auckland shows attracted 150,000 people.

Mike and his family were invited to a 4pm soundcheck as part of the ‘friends and family’ guestlist and “weren’t expecting too much to happen”.

“But when we walked within about 30 metres of the stage, Chris Martin recognised me straight away. What an experience having your name called out over the PA during soundcheck.”

This was followed by a “surreal” meeting with the band.

“They are just the same as I remember them, very friendly. Chris jumped down over the safety barriers and took his hat off and plunked it on Theo’s head… and then he sort of said jokingly [about Mike] ‘This guy launched our career’.

“I think up to that point [Ellie and Theo] knew I had some connection with them, but this was proof,” he laughs.

Mike says back when he produced the EP, ‘Brothers and Sisters’, the band was relatively unknown.

“I remember them being funny and relaxed. I was learning as a recording engineer, so I was trying out all these different ideas, and they were open to that.”

Mike remembers driving the band to Oxford for a gig that was attended by only a handful of people.

“I had the guitarist and the bass player in the back of my car. They had no money. There were about five people at the show, but they weren’t demoralised. They just got on with it and performed.”

Mike says, although the EP didn’t make a “massive splash” it started a momentum that kept building. One of the singles went on to enter the UK charts and lead to a record deal with Parlophone.

“At their next gigs there were more and more people there, and then within a couple of months they had a lot of record company interest. They just took off.”

After the recording Mike moved to New Zealand, and they lost touch - but he and Lucy did reconnect with some of the band at their 2016 concert.

He says it was even better this time, having Ellie and Theo with them.

These days Mike is one of only two piano tuners in the Top of the South and spends half his time tuning pianos and the rest writing production music for television.

“I’ve got about 300 tracks now, all published, and snippets of them have been on all these global TV shows - America’s Got Talent, Master Chef and Top Gear. I never know where they’re going to end up.”

In fact, one of the very first tracks he produced is played globally somewhere every 25 minutes.

Mike’s now planning on going back to the UK next August for some family birthday celebrations, which happen to coincide with a Coldplay concert just down the road – and you can bet he has already started planning another meeting with the band.