The Coral’s James Skelly dissects their new double album and why they owe Cillian Murphy a favour
Throughout the last two decades, The Coral have travelled down a unique path, navigating pitfalls and trappings that no other band has had to face. Doubters have written them off in the past, but they’ve always succeeded in overcoming adversity through reinvention. The latest guise of the Wirral natives is their most unexpected yet, as they have created the soundtrack to a fictional spaghetti western for their new album Sea Of Mirrors.
If that wasn’t bold enough, as this is The Coral, who tend to ignore the orthodox train of thought, they’ve made it a double album thanks to the beautifully bizarre Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show. Officially speaking, Sea of Mirrors is their new record, and the latter is only available to listen to on physical formats. However, the albums are cousins and exist within the same batshit yet brilliant world that The Coral seem intent on establishing.
As indie mainstays, The Coral have now released 12 albums despite enduring a lengthy hiatus, and these two new records see them expand their sonic horizons into new areas. From the start, the Merseyside group have always been outsiders. They arrived too late to be bundled in with the garage rock scene and came before the surge of indie bands in the late 2000s following the rise of the Arctic Monkeys. However, their position as an imitable force is precisely how The Coral likes it.
Their latest two albums are significant for several reasons. While talk surrounding the records has largely been occupied by the cameo made by Cillian Murphy, which Far Out does discuss with Skelly, they were also the last LPs made at Liverpool’s legendary Parr Street Studios and include a contribution from founding member Bill Ryder-Jones, who left the band in 2010.
Speaking on Zoom, Skelly dived into the details with Far Out about the two new albums, the special guests who brought the vision to life, friendship with Noel Gallagher and much more.
Q&A with The Coral frontman James Skelly:
Far Out: Congratulations on Sea of Mirrors and Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show! What made you decide to release a double album, and were they made simultaneously or separately?
James Skelly: “We were in Parr Street studios in Liverpool and got the news that the guy who owned it was going to sell it, and it was closing in two months. We’d worked there for ten years, and Chris (Taylor), who worked there but sort of ran the place, said, ‘Do you want to make the last album here, and have you got any songs?’ and we were like, ‘No, but we’ll get some (songs)’.”
“We’d go in every day and write the tunes as we were going. It was around Covid, so it was just me and Ian (drummer Ian Skelly). We’d lay acoustic and drums down. Sometimes, Paul (Duffy) would come in and play bass. We just recorded a load of stuff, and then a month later, Chris put it on a Dropbox, and it dawned on us that we had two different albums, two different things. One was more of a narrative story, and one was more like a stream of consciousness. Then we embellished the themes and brought the rest of the band in to grow it into the two albums.”
Didn’t Nick Power (keyboardist) also write a film script for Sea of Mirrors?
“Yeah, I’d sent him the tunes, and then we came up with the idea of this film, a sort of surreal Spaghetti Western, and he came up with the idea that it was about everything going wrong on the set and trying to make a film about it, a bit like the Federico Fellini film 8½.”
What was the attraction to the spaghetti western genre?
“This guy was trying to do like a spaghetti western horror, but he couldn’t get the funding. We’d had ‘Wild Bird’ and thought, ‘Oh, that would be the theme tune from an imaginary soundtrack’. That set it in motion, and this idea that you can take a genre and use it for what you want. A lot of directors who made American spaghetti westerns weren’t that into westerns; it was just a popular genre, and they’d use it to make a horror, a comedy or a political film. So, in a way, we just did the same with music. Wu-Tang did it with the Kung-Fu genre. You take that genre and use it for whatever you want.”
Was having a loose framework for your songwriting on these two albums helpful?
“When you’re stuck, you’re like, ‘Okay, what would the character in the film be thinking?’ So it helps you in a way. Also, you can’t just be like, ‘Oh, here’s our 12th album. It’s ten songs with this picture of us on the front.’ It’s got to be something, even if it’s a ridiculous idea, that makes people speak about it or notice it.”
Parr Street Studios was shut down in 2020. Were the two new albums in the works since back then?
“We’d begun working on it, but that shut down, and then we were basically working out of a room in a rehearsal place. You’d have a heavy metal band next door, and then we’d have to wait for them to stop to play this really quiet music. We did bits at Stereolab’s studio near Peckham, then we did some stuff at Bill’s (Ryder-Jones) Yawn Studios, then finished it in Kempston Street, the new studio we’ve done through the same people who used to run Parr Street, so it was like a full journey.”
The Coral also worked with producer Sean O’Hagan on the new project. What was his role in bringing Cillian Murphy onboard to play a spoken word part on ‘Oceans Apart’ from Sea of Mirrors?
“Sean had done the soundtrack for his first film. We talked about what we could put over the end of the song and explained that we couldn’t find an actor. He was like, ‘Well, I know someone who knows Cillian Murphy. Would he be any good?’ I never thought I’d hear about it again, but then I got an email from Cillian saying, ‘Yeah, I’ll help you out, and I like the band’. For me, it was more like he’d help us as a professional actor to find who the character was and put the part down for us. It was like if you got a session musician in a way.”
John Simm also appears on ‘Drifter’s Prayer’. What’s the relationship between him and the band?
“He was coming to see us before we even had an album out. He knew Ian McCulloch from Echo & The Bunnymen; they were mates, and Mac had put him onto us. John was a champion in the really early days. We met him and got on with him, and Nick still chats with him sometimes, so we said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ Then he came down and did it in three takes.”
Another famous friend of the band is Noel Gallagher, who has consistently supported you. He named The Coral as one of his “favourite ever” groups during an appearance on Later with Jools Holland in 2021 and also discussed watching you guys perform at an extremely early show in London.
“I think it was on the day we were signed — when Sony signed us — we played a gig for them. This is really early on. And you know what, he’s always helped us out. We became mates in the end, and he always looked after us by making sure we were treated well. Because you go on tour with some bands, and it’s like they’ve forgotten what it was like to be in our position at the time, but Noel and Liam never forgot. They were both great.”
Bill Ryder-Jones receives a writing credit on the titular ‘Sea of Mirrors’ by The Coral for the first time since his departure in 2010. How was it to work together again?
“I’d say ‘worked’ loosely. I think he was a bit pissed and sent me some chords in lockdown, saying, ‘I think you should write a tune like this’. I don’t think he thought he’d hear about it again, but I could hear a melody and wrote a little chorus. I’d had the title ‘Sea of Mirrors’ for a couple of years and thought, ‘Those chords sound like a sea of mirrors’. I wrote the song pretty fast, sent it to him, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s great’. I never would have come up with those chords.”
Sea of Mirrors and Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show are both out now through Run on Records.
