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Has Chris Martin been stealing songs?

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A little-known US indie band have accused Coldplay of plagiarism on their song Viva La Vida.

Brooklyn group Creaky Boards have posted a Youtube clip, alleging that the melody of Coldplay's Viva La Vida track sounds very similar to one of their songs - and that the Chris Martin may have even seen Creaky Boards play live last year.

In their YouTube video, Creaky Boards are shown playing at the 2007 CMJ festival in New York, and a caption posted by songwriter Andrew Hoepfner reads: "We were flattered when we thought we saw Chris Martin in the crowd that night. He seemed pretty into it. Maybe too into it."

He adds: "The crazy thing is that my song is actually called The Songs I Didn't Write."

Creaky Boards' clip compares sections of both songs so you can decide for yourself.

All this might just look like a cheap publicity stunt by Creaky Boards were it not for what Chris Martin told MTV a few weeks back. The Coldplay singer songwriter told MTV: "We look at what other people are doing and try and steal all the good bits. We steal from so many different places that hopefully it becomes untraceable."

Oh. So has Chris Martin really been caught out? The band maintain that their track was written and demoed in March 2007, a full six months before Martin saw Creaky Boards play live.

The song Viva La Vida is currently starring in TV ads for Apple (the computer company that is, not Chris Martin's daughter) while the parent album has sold 302,000 copies in the UK in its first three days of release and looks like being the UK's biggest selling album of the year already.