The New Cue #319 September 18: The Coral
"I got an email off Cillian Murphy saying he was a fan and he'd help us out."
Good morning,
We hope your weekend was tip top. If not a straight ten out of ten, then at the very least a high eight. We’ve got just the ticket to start your week, in the shape of a good old fashioned chin-wag with James Skelly from The Coral. James tells us all about the ideas behind the band’s two – yes, two - new albums, Sea Of Mirrors and Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show, how they got Cillian Murphy on a track and working with original Coral guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones again. As well as being the lead singer in one of the UK’s premier rock and roll combos, James is also a subscriber to The New Cue, aka The World’s Greatest Music Newsletter. Nice one, James! If you’d like to join James and receive every edition of The New Cue twice a week, direct to your inbox, then just click the button below.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… The Coral
Since emerging from the Wirral in the early 2000s, The Coral have charted their own, highly-enjoyable course. There’s been the psychedelic sea shanties of their 2002 debut, a bonkers mini-album about German tennis player Boris Becker (2004’s Nightfreaks And The Sons Of Becker) and 2020’s #2 hit Coral Island, a double concept LP about a fictional, haunted seaside resort. The conceptual bug has clearly stuck, as a couple of weeks ago the band released two concept albums on the same day: Sea Of Mirrors and Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show. The former is a soundtrack to an imaginary Western and the latter a sort of pretend radio show broadcast from the fictitious Coral Island that features the Skellys’ grandad as the DJ. They’re both excellent, and Sea Of Mirrors in particular is one of the best records they’ve made. Last week Chris called up frontman James Skelly to hear about the ideas behind them, working with Hollywood A-Lister Cillian Murphy, working with his old Coral bandmate Bill Ryder-Jones and more. Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show is a physical-only release, but you can dive into Sea Of Mirrors as you have a read here…
Hi James, how are you?
Not too bad, thanks.
The reception to the new records has been amazing so far. Does that still take you by surprise?
Yeah. It’s hard to know because you’re relying on other people. You get so close to it that you can’t hear it yourself anymore. You’d have to be a psychopath to think everything you do is good, so you’re kind of thinking, ‘Is this a piece of shit?’. But everyone seems to like it.
There’s a bit of momentum coming off Coral Island which was a big success for you.
With Coral Island, we’d been sat on it for ages. We’d sort of given up at that point, so we just put it out. So if there’s anyone in bands out there: Give up on your dreams and they might come true! We just thought, ‘Let’s put it out as a double album, who’s going to care?’ And it went really, really well. So that gave us confidence. But before then we really thought no-one was going to care.
I suppose that can give you some freedom in a way…
It did. The album before Coral Island, Move Through The Dawn, was our worst performing album. It got really good radio, what was left of TV, and all that, but it sold by far the least of all of our albums, so we just thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s make a double album.’
Rather than being a double album, Sea Of Mirrors and Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show are two separate concept albums. Were they two separate ideas from the start?
We had five songs off each, which we thought was one album. But then we saw that they were really different lyrically. Musically, you could have probably swapped them around, but lyrically one definitely had a real narrative, a personal, third person story while the other one was more stream of consciousness. Having Holy Joe… as a radio show was Nick [Power, keyboardist] and Ian [Skelly, drummer]’s idea. They were talking about having a midnight radio show that would be broadcast from Coral Island. We weren’t quite ready to leave Coral Island, so we started working on that and embellishing ideas from there. Once you get an idea you can work within that framework. Until after lockdown and life came back and suddenly you’ve got a million other things to do and it becomes like, ‘Oh god, what have we committed ourselves to?’.
Do you find almost working to a brief like that quite inspiring?
Yeah. I think we’ve always had loose concepts for each album. In a way, we’ve honed them on Sea Of Mirrors. I’ve tried before to write as a character, a sort of existential thing, but maybe not as concise as this. I like the idea of existential thoughts where it’s almost psychedelic. Like in [‘60s American novelist] Richard Yates’ books. It’s a different type of psychedelia. Coral Island being such an obvious concept, like Sgt. Pepper or something, it definitely gave us inspiration and it ended up being a double album. Once you get to 43, you’ve got to sometimes write through characters or find ways to look outside of yourself otherwise you’d have to keep destroying your life just to have something to write about.
Sorry to do this darling, but I’ve got an album to write…
Yeah! Sorry, I need to write Blood On The Tracks Part 2! I think it does help you to step outside and you can write more personally in a way.
How would you describe the concept behind Sea Of Mirrors as a one-line movie pitch?
It’s like an imaginary soundtrack to a film. Like an Italian Western, but something like 8½ by Fellini. The idea was, if Fellini directed a Western, he would make it about the set and everything going wrong on the set and the actors in it and the set is doomed, it gets flooded in the end. The main character is this actor who was a star like Bela Lugosi or Buster Keaton, like an old Golden Age star, but everything changed so fast. One minute he’s this star and the next he’s in some B-Movie. Before that he saw himself as a serious actor and he’s looking back thinking, ‘How did I get to here?’ But it’s like a psychedelic experience in his mind.
Not quite a snappy one-line pitch. Musically, it’s really evocative of that world too. It’s like Lee Hazlewood and Ennio Morricone...
You know all the stuff with AI? That kind of got us thinking that that’s what we do with music. You want to hear the album where it’s like Lee Hazlewood has produced an Italian Western soundtrack. You can 100% picture that, but it doesn’t exist, so you’ve got to try and make it yourself in a way. I think that it helps that we’re a bit older in a way, too. I remember one of the first reviews of Shadows Fall saying: Should 18-year-olds sound like this? Maybe we were always old souls in a way.
I do remember in early interviews you talking about learning jazz chord progressions and obscure records…
That was Bill [Ryder-Jones, original Coral guitarist]. One minute we were into Super Furry Animals and Oasis and all that – which is still great – but then Bill started smoking weed and next minute he started playing all these jazz records and Morricone stuff, dub, Django Reinhardt... Suddenly, within a year, he could play all that stuff. Around that time, I got ill and moved into my nan and grandad’s house and my grandad had all these Reader’s Digest records. It’d be like Hawaiian steel band music, Gregorian singing and stuff like that. I was listening to that in this world of like doilies and kittens and stuff. It was a strange, a strange world, but I sort of thought, ‘Well, no one else is inhabiting this world…’ We were trying to do the opposite to The Strokes which was what was going on then. We’ve already got The Strokes, so let’s sing about tea cups…
Did Bill co-write a song with you for Sea Of Mirrors?
Yeah. In lockdown, just out the blue, he sent me this chord progression like, ‘You should write a song with something like this…’ He probably thought nothing of it, and the next day I’d written the chorus of it and it just fitted these words I’d written. I had the words for Sea Of Mirrors already and they just fitted the melody of Bill’s chords. That lyric was kind of where the concept of Sea Of Mirrors grew from.
It was 21 years since your debut album last year. Did you ever talk about doing something with Bill like a one-off gig to mark the occassion?
I’d rather just do something new with him. Bill’s doing his own stuff at the moment. I’ve heard his new album and I think it could be his best one. Everyone is gonna love his new stuff.
Cillian Murphy is on Sea Of Mirrors, how did that come about?
[High Llamas singer and Sea Of Mirrors producer] Sean O’Hagan is friends with him. I think Sean did the soundtrack to his first ever film that went straight to video or something. He’s one of Sean’s best friends and he mentioned it to him. I didn’t think anything of it and then got an email off Cillian saying he was a fan of the band and let’s have a chat. We just chatted and I gave him the pitch and he pretended to know what I was talking about. We ended up chatting about books and films we like and he said he’d help us out. I listened back to what he did in the studio and it was like the cherry on top.
Did you return the favour and do ‘Barbenheimer’ at the cinema?
I’d love to see Oppenheimer, but I haven’t had the chance to. The kids have only just got back to school and I’ve been doing interviews for the album. I’d love to see it in the IMAX or something. Or get a really big telly and watch it on that.
Do it. Nice to talk to you, James.
Nice one, see ya!
CC