As his handlers hovered, the usually affable Coldplay singer stretched out on the carpet in a dim and airless room backstage at a TV show.
It was hours before show time and the singer's muscles were tight and his expression sour.
Finally, he looked up with pleading eyes.
"Can we escape? Let's go somewhere else. Maybe some place with trees? I have a car and a driver ..."
A few minutes later, the lanky Brit ducked through an alleyway behind the talk show's Hollywood Boulevard studios and climbed into an ebony SUV that whisked him and his visitor up the hill to Griffith Park.
"This looks good," he said, tapping the window.
"Yes, let's stop here."
As soon as his sneakers hit the grass, the black-clad Martin was as perky as the Labrador that trotted past him on a path.
Hummingbirds and butterflies were in the air and Martin was at ease, enough so that he started making confessions and jokes.
He finds it difficult to separate the two.
"Like millions of people in the world, I can't listen to Coldplay," Martin said with a daft wink.
"But my reason is professional. You see, I'm always thinking about the next thing.
"I'm also always looking for something that will inspire the next thing.
"Look, we're the one band we can't plagiarise. So really there's no point in me listening to it.
"If I think, 'Well, that's good,' then I'll want to use it, which won't work. And if I think, 'Hey that's terrible,' then I'll be depressed over breakfast.
"It's a classic lose-lose situation."
If you listen to Coldplay - and many people do - then you know that Martin is an earnest voice in an ironic age.
That has opened the band up to savage insults (Noel Gallagher once sneered that they were "four Didos with willies") but instead of retreating, Martin decided to join in the sport.
No-one gives Chris Martin more grief these days than Martin himself. He makes fun of his hair, clothes, diet and famed falsetto.
He even mocks himself for thinking, deep-down, that he's cool for not being cool.
"We've never been about being cool and we never will be. And I think in a way that's quite cool.
"But I can't think about it too much - because if you think about it then you automatically aren't cool.
"Wait, I've gone too far. I'm not cool. Again."
Coldplay's new album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends arrived with considerable heat.
The lead single, Viva la Vida, charged up the charts and pre-orders for the album were the largest in the history of iTunes.
The band became known for polished, piano-based songs of soaring pop exultation and rainy-day reflection, but with this new studio album - the band's fourth - it has made a bid at reinvention.
The songs are still from the heart, but maybe more from the gut.
No matter what, Coldplay won't be able to win over a certain constituency that, frankly, has detested them too much and for too long to start listening now.
It has become fashionable to slag them. Martin says it's because he wears his heart on his sleeve when he sings.
"If you allow yourself to be vulnerable in your music, people will feel it a lot more," he said.
"But a lot more people will also hate it or mock it. It's almost like a deal with the devil, but I'm happy to take that deal.
"It doesn't feel right to me to sing about stuff I don't believe in."
Coldplay's 2000 debut album, Parachutes, yielded the yearning, breakthrough hit Yellow and the 2002 follow-up, A Rush of Blood to the Head, came with a flurry of hit singles: In My Place, Clocks and The Scientist.
That's when things got complicated.
Relentless tour dates, the tug of their personal lives and the turbulence of success put Coldplay in a shaky place.
The members say they felt pressured by their label, EMI/Capitol Records, to create a follow-up with similar scope and sound.
The album was delayed and EMI's stock dropped (literally) as a result, turning up the tension.
The result was X&Y, a 2005 album that sold well but, in the band's view, lacked clarity - it was a collection of singles for the iPod generation.
To steady themselves, Martin said, Coldplay looked for a place to "make it home-made again."
It turned out to be in a blind alley in London.
"We found this little bakery, and we bought it and turned it into a, well, it's like a youth club," Martin said.
"Do you read the Harry Potter books? It's a bit like that train stop they use, the platform 9, which you can't find unless you know where it is.
"If you drive by quickly, it doesn't look like anything is there. If you go in, it's like a little band heaven.
"Everything is hand-painted. There was a dartboard, but it's gone now. We banned some of the leisure activities.
"The last thing you need when you're trying to reinvent yourself is a pool table. Drummers tend to love pool more than they love drumming. It's a bigger stick," he said.
The band was back together.
"I think with each band there comes a point where they have to find a place to be together otherwise they end up living in different countries and just meet on stage.
"When you get famous, there are two reactions to your other bandmates.
"You either think 'I could do this without you.' Or you think, 'I really couldn't do this without you.'
"You're luckier if you are in the second category. We've always been very grateful for each other."
For Viva la Vida, the band brought in famed producer Brian Eno..
The result is a wild ride: Hidden tracks, a towering church organ here, North African tabla and flamenco hand claps there.
Viva la Vida has Beatles-esque strings, a U2-style build and a grand old church bell that, if you listen closely, has bird chirps trailing its toll like the tail of a kite.
In her review, Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers said Eno's presence has Coldplay making their "official leap toward greatness."
Martin said he feels time is moving faster these days.
He's the father of two children with his wife, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, which has inspired him to cut away the distractions in his life.
The day before the visit to Griffith Park, he and the band were at the MTV Movie Awards to perform Viva la Vida live, for the first time anywhere.
At rehearsals, Martin was grim-faced - everything seemed to be going wrong.
The band soldiered on through the rehearsals and broadcast, no easy feat considering the blank-faced fans in the venue.
An intense butterfly-shaped cascade of confetti which shot up from both sides of the stage halfway through the song won the crowd over.
It was the sort of image that inspires a gag reflex in Coldplay detractors, but the band (and audience) loved it.
"Those butterflies are important to us because they make us feel very ... happy," Martin recalled the next day at the park.
"At a time when you could be insecure, whenever we fire those butterflies up we just can't help but smile." - Geoff Boucher
