Coldplay Donate 1 Million Pounds To Charity

09/24/09 1:42pm

by Kate Harper (CHARTattack)

Coldplay have donated 1 million British pounds (about $1.7 million Canadian) to Kids Company, a children's charity that helps disadvantaged children and former young offenders.

The charity's Camila Batmanghelidjh told NME.com the band were "moved" by "tough stories" they heard upon visiting the charity's centres, and also have plans to provide music lessons for the kids.

"I got the feeling the donation was something they had planned from the start of their careers," Batmanghelidjh told the website.

The donation comes after instrumental guitarist Joe Satriani settled his plagiarism lawsuit against Coldplay last week.

Satriani sued the band last December, saying Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" used "substantial, original portions" of his "If I Could Fly." "Viva La Vida" is Coldplay's biggest hit to date and Coldplay won a song of the year Grammy Award for the track in February.

Billboard.com reports a source close to Satriani told the publication the guitarist and rock band made an agreement to avoid the case going to trial. Legal sources reportedly told the publication both parties reached a financial settlement and Coldplay don't have to admit they did anything wrong.

But Coldplay have once again found themselves the subject of plagarism accusations from singer/songwriter Andy Gallagher, who says the band's video for Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends has "an awful lot of similarities" to his clip for "Something Else."

"I think it's unfair that 'Strawberry Swing' will probably be nominated for numerous awards and is being universally acclaimed as groundbreaking, when ['Something Else' director] Owen Trevor had virtually the same idea at least a year before," Gallagher says in a statement.

Shynola, the directors of the "Strawberry Swing" video, released a statement on Wednesday in which they said they had never seen the video for "Something Else" before and rebutted Gallagher's claims. You can read it here.

Here are the two videos, so you can judge them yourself: