The Coral reveal how they persuaded Cillian Murphy to appear on new album
The Coral have revealed how they managed to secure Irish actor Cillian Murphy on their forthcoming album, Sea of Mirrors.
The Wirral rockers previously announced they will be releasing two records, Sea of Mirrors and Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show, in September. The albums will have continuous themes, along with influences from spaghetti westerns and American folk-country music. Murphy has contributed a spoken word part on Sea of Mirrors album closer ‘Oceans Apart’. The Coral first tried to secure Frank Nero and Terence Hill, but after facing rejection, they turned to the Peaky Blinders star after the album’s co-producer Sean O’Hagan revealed a connection to the actor.
Frontman James Skelly told NME: “Sean was like, ‘Oh I know someone. I did his first film. He might be good – Cillian Murphy’ and I was like ‘What? One of the best actors in the world?’ And then Cillian Murphy just emailed and was like, ‘Ah, yeah I love the band, I’m up for helping you out’.
“Then we just had a conversation about what it was going to be, because we needed help with it. We were speaking about books we liked and films and how you build a character. He went away and thought about the character and tried different things.”
Skelly continued: “He just sent what he did for the album and said it should be like an old sort of American actor like Bella Lugosi or Buster Keaton. The idea was these massive stars ended up in these B-movies. And they were like, ‘Where is my life?’ That’s the idea, this internal thing of, ‘How did I get here?’ He just nailed it and we put it in the track and put some reverb on it. We were like ‘Nice one Cillian, thanks a lot, you put the cherry on top.’”
Listen to The Coral’s new single ‘Wild Bird’ below.
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