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Assessing the potentially plump success of scouse, pirate band,
The Coral, the NME wrote:
"The best new band in the country: it's one sentence we never
tire of writing".
And never tire they do. But anticipating the accusation
is a reckless, poor substitute for having the balls
to avoid it in the first place. The NME, like so many
of the UK press, never hedges its bets when it comes
to announcing your new favourite band simply because
it is wilfully able to produce the kind of hype that
is necessary to prove it. Rather than being detached
observers of greatness, the press make significant and
interested interventions. Always with surprise. Always
with mock indifference. It's a product of and a product
perpetuating it's own myth. Take The Strokes
in 2001 and The Hives in 2002: a feature in every issue,
a face on every cover, a story for every occasion. And
what a funny old self-referencing system it is all too:
"Hey this band's bloody marvellous. And what d'y know,
we have another exclusive". The emperor's new clothes?
Nah, fairytales don't even come into it. It's a spurious
marketing ploy known as creating the demand. You have
shitloads of old tat in your backyard. What do you do?
You tell everybody that shitloads of old tat is exactly
where's it at. And the good news? You're always going
to have a plentiful supply of old tat to sell. What
could be better or more resourceful??
What could be better is announcing a genuine talent
with a more modest and less clamourous brodcasting style.
And do The Coral fit these criteria? Well you better
hold on to all your emperors' new hats, because it could
very well be true.
Not since Gomez shuffled on to the scene in late nineties
has there been such a stirring of prodigious young talent.
Similarly low-key, similarly ramshackle and shambolic,
similarly attired and similarly inspired, The Coral
have that same fourscore and twenty years of musical
talent squeezed into one clammy pair of underpants and
a school bag that Gomez were lauded for at the time
of 'Bring It On' in '99. And what a cursed and enviable
status indeed to have: you are better musicians at 18
than any one of your hectoring peers will be at 65.
You have better tunes. You work live like seasoned pros.
And the icing on the cake? You seriously don't give
a flying fuck:
"Music has been forgotten and been replaced by attitude. I don't
care about posing. I don't care about impressing people. I just want
to impress myself".
Explains Coral's frontman, James Skelly who admits to
having so little regard for radio music and airfix punk
that he gets up and puts Harry Nilsson on his
deck in the morning. They are also on record as saying
that they'd rather record an album like Miles Davies
'Kind of Blue' or Love's 'Forever Changes' than churn
out pale imitations of Kurt Cobain's puerile exit bullshit.
And their attitude to the charts:
" The charts are irrelevant," says Adam "Good music doesn't get into
the charts".
So young and yet so wise. And on punk:
" I don't think it's cool not to play your instrument. It's shit"
Six years old and hailing from the seaside town Hoylake,
some fifteen minutes out of the UK city of Liverpool
the band were discovered by ex-Shack drummer Alan Wills
in rehearsal. Clasping the shoulders of the band like
an asylum seeker would a train-ticket, Alan promptly
formed the band's own label, Deltatronic. The band not
so unpredictably went on to tour with the Charlatans
and supported Oasis on their recent self-congratulatory
gig at London's Shepherds Bush Empire. 2001 saw the
release of 2 eps 'Shadows Fall' and 'The Oldest Path'.
And if it is something we want to happen the rest will
indeed be history. And with the release of the band's
third EP release, Skeleton Key on April 1st, it is going
to be something we want to happen.
Happy to explore instruments that they don't even know
the name of, the record is a funky little treasure trove
of angular, retro psychedelia and rasping blues. Sea-shanty
title track, 'Skeleton Key' with it's bawdy, rum-fuelled
clamour of squealing guitars and growling harmonies
and its nightmarish claustrophobia is a little fun-sized
party animal with enough jiggery-poguery to keep a roomful
of bandits amused for the evening.
Bendy guitars and rubber faces, the party continues
with 'Dressed Like A Cow' - which, it might reasonably
be said, enacts some boozy imagined meeting between
Hendrix, The Doors and the Spoonful's John Sebastian.
This veritable skeleton crew of harmonies and energetic
scrapes and leaps lovingly gives rise to 'Darkness'
- a song that melds the delicate chiming joy of Radioheads'
'No Surprises' to a chorus of floating xylophones and
sliding steel guitars. The trumpet and harmonica flourishes
and the military snare drilling it up in the background
add to the mix to provide a dreamy luscious sunset of
a song.
'Darkness' is a midnight toker's lullaby.
Exit track, 'Sheriff John Brown' is perhaps the only
hole in this record's defence with its unimaginably
bizarre and dis-synchronous redneck American vocal:
it's odd, very odd indeed. Teasingly out of context
and anachronistic with it's Animals' style Hammond and
its 'rising sun' guitar lick, 'Sheriff John Brown' suggests
a deeply intense Lovin' Spoonful getting hot and gritty
in the city. And yet for all its muscular charm it doesn't
sit squarely with the solid, honest genius that lies
elsewhere on this record. But then never since Lonnie
Donnegan and the Beatles has the UK music scene worn
its US references on its sleeve so unashamedly. Ripping
off US folklore could be perceived to be a natural enough
extension of this. Either that, or we simply don't have
any folklore left of our own. And judging by our youth's
own treacherous embrace of urban gangastaisms, it is
of course entirely likely.
Joyriders? No. Romantic dreamers? Yes. The Coral produce
songs that sound as they were written in a bus-shelter
by some time travelling poet laureate who at some earlier
period or other had hooked up with Lord Byron and Jim
Morrison and gone crazy in a brothel. It is a sound
that is full of ruffs and sleeves but it is equally
garbed out too in Peter Pan tights, Huckleberry Finn
breeches, and Edgar Allen Poe glasses.
For a band who like BMX bikes, make their own films of disjointed
ku fu capers, loathe hippies more than punks, are expressive thinkers
and readers of Hemmingway, The Coral possibly have more friggin'
in the riggin' than most, and are more than a little capable of selling
their idiosyncratic brand of middle-earth cartoon piracy to the world.
Are The Coral the band to watch?
No. They're a band to listen to, dear boy. Quite simply the
band to listen to.
But you didn't hear it here first, okay?
The Coral are:
Lee Southall - Vocals/guitar
Nick Power- Organ/vocals
Paul Duffy- Bass/saxophone
Ian Skelly - Drums
James Skelly - Guitar/vocals
Bill Ryder-Jones- Guitar/trumpet
Relevant sites:
http://www.thecoral.co.uk
Alan Sargeant for Crud Magazine© 2002
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