The Coral’s wild ride: ‘We were treated like kings – but we were cretins’
“Once in a generation something so revolutionary happens in music that afterwards nothing is ever the same again. Right now, that’s exactly what’s happening,” wrote a breathless NME editor, Conor McNicholas, in November 2002. The reason for his exuberance? His magazine was giving away a free CD entitled The New Rock Revolution, a compilation of the latest, hottest guitar bands.
Groups on the CD included The Libertines, The Datsuns, The Cooper Temple Clause, The Thrills and Ikara Colt, many of whom are now residing – to quote Spinal Tap – in the “Where are they now?” file. But the freebie also featured a young six-piece band from Hoylake on the Wirral who’d released their self-titled debut album earlier that year. The Coral sounded like no-one else in the Noughties guitar rock boom. A raucous psychedelic mash-up of The Animals, Love, Syd Barrett, sea shanties, Captain Beefheart, The Specials, Motown bands, Ennio Morricone and close-harmony vocal groups like The Four Freshmen, The Coral’s music defied genre.
If NME was guilty of hyperbole, it was certainly true that nothing was ever the same again for the six friends from Hilbre High School. The Coral – who existed on Pot Noodles, weed and manic teenage energy – went on a madcap journey that took them from a fishing town near Liverpool to the Mercury and Brit awards, Top of the Pops and the top of the charts. Along the way the “cosmic Scouse” band, as they were dubbed, accepted awards nominations in a jacuzzi, stole Coldplay’s calamari and headlined a vast concert in a big top that reviewers labelled the 21st century equivalent of The Stone Roses’ legendary Spike Island gig.
Perhaps contrary to expectations back then, the band are still going (albeit as a five piece). Indeed, last year’s album Coral Island was one of the year’s finest. Next month The Coral embark on a UK tour marking the 20th anniversary of their debut LP. So two decades on, how do the key players remember that first flush of fame? And how did they manage to bottle magic on a kaleidoscopic album that was so completely at odds with prevailing musical trends?
“It was like The Goonies or something,” recalls Nick Power, the band’s keyboard player, referring to the 1985 film in which a group of mates go on a bonkers, fairground ride of an adventure. “It was the crest of a wave from about 1999 to 2002.”
Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds, who produced The Coral’s debut album (and subsequent ones), remembers the feeling when he first saw the band play. It was a feeling he’d got in the early Eighties when he first saw Echo & the Bunnymen, who he also produced: he wanted to join the band. Their music invigorated and excited him. Not that things got off to a particularly auspicious start. Broudie’s initial experience of the group came when Alan Wills, the former Shack drummer who signed The Coral to his Deltasonic label, asked him to go up to Liverpool to see them rehearse.
“So I went up to Liverpool. It was a wet Sunday night and there was a rehearsal room on Dale Street, which wasn’t the greatest area on a Sunday night,” Broudie says. “Alan Wills said, ‘They’ll meet you outside the rehearsal room’ and I said, ‘How will I know who they are?’ He said, ‘You’ll think they’re going to rob your phone.’ Which was typical Alan.”
Broudie says the six individuals were talented, funny and bursting with ideas but also bristly and inexperienced. “They were amazing, really. But it was like a two-sided coin. It was amazingly fragile too,” he says. “You could see that if you poked one bit of it wrong it was a like a deck of cards – it would all collapse.”
It didn’t collapse. But Broudie knew he was dealing with something special, raw and unconventional. Songs would change time signatures halfway through or veer off into unexpected directions – a jazzy interlude here, a shanty snippet there. So at the album’s recording at Great Linford Manor in Milton Keynes at the end of 2001, he embraced the band’s way of working. “I remember saying to the engineer that we’d bend to them completely,” Broudie says.
He hired in instruments such as xylophones, glockenspiels and vibraphones and just let them play. He wanted them to be “comfy and almost like kids with a toy box”. His role was “to not ruin it”. He also helped “clear the undergrowth for the tree”: the band had dozens of songs and he helped them untangle ideas.
Vocalist James Skelly tells me he wanted that first album to sound a bit rough around the edges. The songs were done in very few takes. “A debut should have an energy and a sort of na?ve quality. That gets ironed out. But your first album should sound like your first album, not like a third album,” Skelly says. Their approach to writing songs was akin to sampling in hip hop, he says. “We were into what Dr Dre was doing. Just taking stuff and putting it together.”
He also wanted their music to break away from the mid-paced mainstream indie played by the likes of Radiohead, Travis and Starsailor. “We wanted ours to be smaller and spikier,” Skelly explains. Broudie had a vision and “added colour”.
Nick Power gives some examples of the songwriting process. The chords for the song Calendars and Clocks were taken from Frank Sinatra’s It Was A Very Good Year. The band added a Morricone-like interlude, complete with spaghetti western style ‘Ooh-Ahh’s. But its Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young-esque harmonies meant that, despite the cornucopia of influences, the song ended up sounding like no-one but The Coral. The chords for Shadows Fall, meanwhile, were influenced by veteran US vocal group The Mills Brothers. Those who believe that a band’s place of origin defines their sound should look no further than The Coral. You can hear Liverpool in their music: there are clear influences of skiffle music, Merseybeat, and The La’s. But Hoylake is halfway between Liverpool and Wales. So you can also detect the quirky psychedelia of Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.
The band had plenty of fun at the studio. A famous reality TV star at the time was Rik Waller, who’d recently appeared on ITV’s Pop Idol. “We used to have this thing called Waller Watch,” says Skelly. “Wherever you were, if Rik Waller came on the telly – because he was on the telly all the time – everyone had to run up to a certain room. Even when we were doing a take, which I imagine would have done Broudie’s head in.” And what was the punishment for whoever came last? “I think they got the last go on the spliff or something.”
Ah yes. The spliff. There was plenty of that too, as their producer remembers. “It was like, you’ve got a bunch of kids from Hoylake and they’re all into that hydroponic weed, or whatever it is, and usually they can’t afford to get any and suddenly they’ve got a budget to all have their own spliff,” says Broudie. “I remember saying to the engineer, ‘I’m going to have to get a check-up. I get to the end of the day and I can’t think straight. I’m usually a bit more insightful.’ He was laughing and he said, ‘You’re off your tree. They’ve all been sitting smoking weed around you.’ And I said, ‘Is that what it is?’ I hadn’t smoked weed for years.” He’d leave the studio “zonked”.
There was one bone of contention. The band were reluctant to record the song Dreaming of You. The doo-wop track with the earworm chorus was deemed to be a touch safe, perhaps a little too poppy, and excuses were made not to record it. But Broudie knew it could be a career milestone. “I had to make them go back to the studio under duress. It was quite funny. I remember them saying, ‘We can’t record it. Paul [Duffy, bass player] has got earache, we’ve got to go back to Hoylake,’” says Broudie. Dreaming of You went on to sell 600,000 copies and remains The Coral’s signature song. “It’s more famous than the band, which is the way we’d like it,” says Skelly today. “Not that many people have a song in the public consciousness.”
The album was released to positive reviews and reached number five in the charts. Then the madness really started. Power says everything about the period was “hilarious and magical”. Things “exploded”, in part due to the NME heralding a British scene similar to the US garage rock revival spearheaded by The Stokes and The White Stripes. “We were the British answer in a way. I don’t know if it suited us so well but we were all for it,” says Power.
The band simultaneously embraced and rejected the admiration. They performed the single Goodbye on Top of the Pops and were nominated for the Mercury Prize and two Brit Awards, including British Album of the Year (won by Coldplay). They attended neither ceremony, accepting their Mercury nomination live on Channel 4 from a jacuzzi in a Liverpool hotel. “One of our mates was dressed as Freddie Mercury, smoking a turd cigar. We thought it was the funniest thing in the world,” says Power. “We just didn’t care, really. We weren’t bothered by any of it.”
Coldplay took them on tour to Italy. There, in an episode of backstage high jinks, members of Team Coral stole members of Team Coldplay’s seafood. Neither Power nor Skelly will provide too many details as I suspect they’re a touch embarrassed. “They treated us like f_____ kings and we were just like cretins. I’ll always love them for that,” says Power. “We got caught stealing calamari and one of us moonwalked out of the room away from their tour manager,” he explains. Skelly says the band weren’t actually there, but their security were. “It was, like, ‘You’ve stolen Chris’s calamari!’”
The band’s follow-up album, 2003’s Magic and Medicine, reached number one. Just prior to its release, the band headlined a one-day festival in a big top in New Brighton near Liverpool. Called ‘A Midsummer Night’s Scream’, the bill also featured The Thrills, The Zutons (also produced by Broudie), and The Libertines, who’d recently kicked out Pete Doherty due to his drug problems. It was a chaotic and joyous night. There was a rumour that Doherty, who once lived nearby, would turn up and – in cahoots with fans – be crowd-surfed onto the stage. It never happened. But jubilant though the night was, it marked “the end of the first chapter”, according to Skelly.
Things weren’t quite the same afterwards. The haywire endorphin rush of those intense early days was replaced by something more serious and inwards looking. “We were on this mission to break out of our hometown and make an amazing debut album. And when we did it I sort of came back down to earth,” explains Power. Skelly says, “That [big top show] was like the end of that era. Before that, you’d have a spliff and pass it round. After that, everyone had their own spliff.” Literally or metaphorically? “Literally and metaphorically.”
Skelly doesn’t miss the madness. “If I look back, I wouldn’t swap where I am now to be there. It was great. I had a little taste of it and I just thought, ‘It’s not for me, that.’”
Looking back, would Power change anything? “I’d probably say just toe the line just a little bit. And get your mum in BUPA by the time you’re 30.”
And did he? “No,” he says. “But que sera sera.”
The Coral’s 20th anniversary tour starts on 3 March. Tickets: thecoral.co.uk