Hot UK bands duet in visits

By REBECCA BARRY

Lock up your daughters - two of Britain's biggest and sexiest bands are in town.

Welsh buzz band Stereophonics, who boast the biggest-selling British album this year, flew into Auckland early yesterday for a round of interviews and to play at a 400-seat private gig tonight.

Coldplay fly in this afternoon for a sold-out 5000-capacity gig at the Auckland Showgrounds tomorrow night, then leave on Friday morning.

The bands will stay in separate hotels but many are hoping that Coldplay will show their faces at the Stereophonics show at Galatos tonight.

Stereophonics' You Gotta Go There to Come Back is the third of their four albums to go straight to number one on the British charts and has since sold almost half a million copies.

New single Maybe Tomorrow is the most-played British track on UK radio at the moment.

But the band have not sold much on this side of the planet, hence the low-key promotional visit by just two of the trio.

Coldplay, meanwhile, are big Downunder. They have sold 94,000 copies of their two albums in New Zealand, and 11 millon worldwide.

Lead singer Chris Martin is an infamous worry-wart who takes criticism to heart, but Stereophonics frontman Kelly Jones recently invited critics to "go [expletive] themselves".

Both lead singers are heart-throbs. Martin recently proposed to Hollywood beauty Gwyneth Paltrow - he visited her on the set of Ted and Sylvia in Dunedin - and Jones has quite a following in Japan, where female fans are particularly taken with his eyebrows.