More about: The Coral

“We just thought: 'sod it. The most The Coral thing to do is the opposite of what we should do.” Twenty years and eight studio albums into their existence as one of indie’s finest gems, and James Skelly is still intent on doing what he shouldn’t. Drenched in as much warm nostalgia of long summers in seaside towns as it is a slightly off-kilter air of life in the shadows, Coral Island continues the Wirral band’s long-standing ability to create vivid worlds that spring to life through their trademark gentle psychedelic indie sounds.

“We kinda did it on Butterfly House. That was like an ode to another time that was gone,” begins James today, “There’s always a theme running through our albums, but we’ve never gone this far, or been so obvious about it.” Born on the way home from Blackpool one day, the idea of an album based on a fictional coastal town soon sparked the band’s imagination. “We wanted something where we could bring all our ideas together, and Coral Island was that banner. The more we sat on it, the more we were like ‘you know, we could make our ‘White Album’ here’,” explains James excitedly before trying to pin down the nature of their Coral Island itself.

“It’s like a puppet version of reality”, he settles on, likening it to something out of Lost or King Kong. “It can be anything, you can make it what you want. It’s in your mind’s eye, everything moves there like it does in a dream. It exists in the middle of some kind of an endless ocean.” Name-checking movies like Suspiria, The Shining and The Wicker Man, James is keen on the gothic horror vibes than run through the darker moments on an album of two distinct halves.

Landing on the concept of a double-LP in order to give the ideas room to breathe, Coral Island starts with a sense like waking in a town where potential is all around you if you can reach out and grab it, before moving smoothly into character-based moments in its second half. And as you’d imagine, the tracks themselves pivot and glide in a variety of directions too. From the '60s soft-rock vibes of early single ‘Lover Undiscovered’, to the country-rolling ‘Golden Age’, this is a band that has never known how to stay stagnant. Still, Coral Island also contains plenty of nuggets like ‘My Best Friend’: the kind of perfectly-crafted pop gem that Skelly has been writing since the band’s very earliest days.

Adding more credence to their ‘White Album’ comparison, the band were rarely together during recording sessions though their longevity as a band meant that the output didn’t suffer. “We would say, we want this to be The Velvet Underground playing Motown, and everyone would know what that means,” he says, “You’ve gotten your own language because you’ve not just been in a band for years, but you’re brothers. You’ve known each other for thirty years!”

The Skelly brothers aren’t the only family members involved in Coral Island. Their grandad, 85-year-old Ian Murray, also joins the party to narrate at regular points throughout in an ever-so-slightly sinister cameo reminiscent of Small Faces’ ‘Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake’. “I used to live with him,” explains James, “I had his old records, Frank Sinatra, Frankie Lymon, Tony Bennett, different stuff like that. I wrote liner notes for the record and I was like, let’s ask Cillian Murphy or one of them to do it. Ian was like, ‘we should get grandad’”.

As intriguing as it would be to hear Tommy Shelby introduce listeners to Coral Island, there’s something more real about their grandad’s voice. James is fully in agreement by now, and admits his brother got it right. “He’s got the old time voice that doesn’t exist any more”, he says before continuing down memory lane with the kind of nostalgic memories that run all through the record, laughing at the times he spent hanging off the sides of ice cream vans as they drove round Birkenhead together as a family. “My dad had a food van, selling burgers and all that. As I was the older brother, he’d set me up a little stall selling Panda Cola and all that shit,” he chuckles, “But you’d get to see the fair being set up, and there was a magic to it. And you know: that smell of candyfloss. The smell of possibilities and mystery. Because when it’s closed, you know what’s gonna happen but when it opens up? Then you could meet someone, your next best friend or whatever.”

Despite the nostalgia on show throughout Coral Island, James doesn’t agree that these sorts of scenes are a thing of the past. “They are happening now, it’s just not on the news you know?”, he points out, “You can still see a seagull flying and find the beauty in that. And I think that if you don’t, or can’t, then you’re fucked. They’ve got you! It’s just about how it comes and how you capture that feeling”.

How those feelings are captured though is another thing. “I think maybe technology is moving too fast for us,” he ponders, “Like, I believe in progress. But I think right now, it’s overtaking us. And you can’t study what’s happening because every day, the algorithm is different. How do you study what it’s doing to us? Because it’s doing something to us, and it doesn’t seem that good to me. In reality, you have to mix with people, negotiate and navigate. You don’t have to do that on social media, it’s really strange to watch.”

Skelly's very far from a ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ viewpoint though, stating that he “never thinks anything’s better than anything”. Firmly of the view that art is always moving and evolving, it’s fitting that he doesn’t want to dwell too much on his own earlier work. With the twenty-year anniversary of The Coral’s debut Shadows Fall EP, you could forgive him for showing some nostalgia, but he’s having none of it today. “I don’t really look back”, he begins, firmly pointing out that it was a different line-up back then. “It’s a good thing to celebrate, but I’m looking on to the next thing. You can't tell for years to come, but it might be one of our best so we're gonna concentrate on this. We’ve made something that you can’t ignore.” He finishes his point with a laugh. "Whether you like it or not.”

Spare the nostalgia then; the next decade begins here.

Coral Island arrives 30 April via Run On Records/Modern Sky. Pre-order it here. 

More about: The Coral