Freshly reunited and with a critically acclaimed comeback album out earlier this year, the Coral are just as great now as they’ve ever been. Now though, they’ve put aside their ambitions of writing hits like the iconic ‘Dreaming of You’ or ‘In the Morning,’ in favour of an entirely new outlook. I spoke to frontman James Skelly to find out more about this new direction, as well as shining a light on some of the lesser-known aspects of the Coral’s past.
For the frontman of a band that was so excessively labelled as a psychedelic outfit in their heyday, it would appear Skelly isn’t too fussed about his own music, saying “I don’t want to put a name on things too much.” In fact, he went further, stating “I’m not sure what psychedelic is in this day and age.”
Skelly claims that the fame he once strived for is now one of the worst nightmares imaginable. “I’d just have to deal with a lot of people, really, and I don’t think that’s the way I manage work. You know, I just think we’d sort of need to be in control of it, and I don’t think we could deal with that type of drive.”
I questioned him about the indie explosion in Britain that the Coral emerged from, and what he believes caused it. “Maybe there was a bit of a backlash against sort of bloated bands at the time. Bands had become a bit bloated. So I think we wanted to be a bit more lo-fi, a bit more real, in a way. It was also kind of cosying up to everyone, you know. That’s what we thought at the time, anyway, but when you’re young you think a lot of things.”
Asked for the worst piece of criticism the Coral has ever received, he recounted “someone said once that we’d ripped something off The Libertines, when they were covering one of our tunes.” He laughed at the sheer absurdity of the notion. “And we’d actually taken a sample off an old tune.”
My final line of questioning was in regards to the future of the Coral, to which I was plainly told that while he “doesn’t want to give away what the next album’s going to be,” they have most definitely “new songs” that they’re “jamming around” with in the studio. However, he specified that they’ve been “putting them to the side, because we’ve been working on the set.”
As well as this, with most members going on to other bands and solo projects during the Coral’s hiatus, it appears the entire dynamic within the band has changed. Asking if their projects would be affected by the Coral’s reunion, I was told that “we’re still doing different stuff while we’re doing the Coral thing. We don’t really want to get back into it much.” He assured me the Coral would likely not become their main project again for a while, stating quite clearly that “we don’t want to do just one thing anymore. I think that we’re just being creative, really, so we need outlets all the time.”
The Coral are currently on tour in support of their new album Distance Inbetween, and will be stopping at Leeds O2 Academy on 8th December.
Interview by Zack Moore
[image: nightowlbirmingham.com]