The Coral talk ahead of Birmingham gig
The halcyon days of gold and platinum discs are a long way behind Merseyside purveyors of psychedelic folk The Coral.
Their debut, self-titled breakthrough and subsequent number one Magic and Medicine seem to hail from a different era. And yet everyone’s favourite indie combo remain just as relevant as they were in 2002 and 2003.
James Skelly, Nick Power and co continue to release new music every two years and carve out a career against all odds.
The band’s new record, Move Through The Dawn, was released this year and they are marking the occasion with a UK tour, which reaches Birmingham’s O2 Institute tonight.
Keyboard player Nick says: “We started to get ideas together when we were on the road. We were listening to playlists in the van and discussing what we wanted to do. We had about seven or eight tunes written and rehearsed that sounded like the sequel to the 2016 record, Distance Inbetween, which we decided to scrap because we wanted to go in a different direction. That was the dark side of the coin and this is the lighter side of the coin.
“It’s a good Beach Boys-melancholy album. We are quite disciplined with the records. We produce ourselves and clock in at 10 in the morning and clock out at 10 at night.”
Sustaining a career isn’t easy in the days of downloads, disposable pop, TV talent shows and the like. The days of bands recording a dozen albums over the course of two decades has been on the wane for some time. The Coral are happy to buck that trend.
Nick adds: “I look back on the early days as being weird. It was good and it was odd. It was like a strange dream. I don’t think we were ever meant to achieve that, we weren’t prepared for it. But it’s given me the opportunity to stay in work and do what I love. It’s what I always wanted to do.”
