The Coral Find New Life in Old Sounds for 388 album
Photography: John Johnson. L-R: Paul Duffy, Paul Molloy, Nick Power, Ian Skelly, James Skelly.
Critically acclaimed indie band The Coral are James Skelly (vocals), Paul Duffy (bass), Nick Power (keyboard), Ian Skelly (drums) and Paul Molloy (guitar), a group of friends who have been playing together since their Wirral schooldays. In a surprise release today, they dropped their thirteenth studio album, 388. Nick Power breaks down the project.
388 was available in independent record shops for two weeks before any official announcement and is only available in black vinyl. “The last two albums we've done 17 different colourways, being quite big conceptual things with loads of add-ons. We wanted to strip it all back,” explains Power. “We put them in to help record shops really, and try and get people talking about it in an old school way. We're always looking for something, always. Really, our main thing is, what can we offer that no one else offers?”
Their previous three albums – Coral Island, Sea of Mirrors and Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show – Power now sees as sharing a distinctive post-lockdown character. “We did these sprawling conceptual things. Everyone was able to pitch in with loads and loads of ideas, and there was loads of time.” The band members have since moved into a new stage of life, and as a result 388 is a very different work. “For the first time, everyone's either got kids or had to find work again, part-time work anyway, as in it's very rare that you can make a full-time living off a band our size now, even though you should. So, it’s more about a completely new era with new experiences.”
The album grew out of their 2024 book tour promoting The Coral: The Making of the Debut Album. “Every place we went, it’s like pavilions in the maddest places like Porthcawl, which is more Coral Island than Blackpool, just fucking mad gaffs. It really suited us because it's that sort of in-the-past-but-in-the-present juxtaposition.” Talking about their youth as they wandered faded seaside piers and rifled through bootleg tapes at market stalls led to another retrospective project, the documentary Dreaming of You: The Making of The Coral, which premiered last autumn.
“At the end of the day, the music and the art of it is the most important thing. And that thing we built as kids, that pact we had as kids, it was like a blood oath, it was pure Goonies, and I can’t shake it”
It also took them back to the music that first inspired them. “Because we were with each other every day, you start getting into that thing that we used to do, swapping music. We were looking back to the past for the first time: we used to love a lot of rocksteady, early Marley and The Specials. We haven't really looked at any of that stuff since the first album – we kind of moved away from it.” As they started to write the first songs for 388, they realized that their songwriting roots lay in the early Lee “Scratch” Perry-produced singles by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “They aren’t even reggae, there's just these raw, almost eerily emotional tunes, dead unsophisticated but heavy as fuck. And we were like, ‘Oh, that's the spring we've got to drink from now.’”
In part, Power sees this return to their roots as a reaction against the cultural changes of the past twenty years. “I used to look at American bands, and they’d be like, ‘We want to be big’, and English bands didn’t have that. I don’t know if it’s because we were a bit more of a socialist country, so you’d have a little bit of a blanket of social care. But I think because now we’ve become more like America, everyone’s just dog-eat-dog, and an uber-capitalist fucking dystopia.” The other big change for the worse that he sees is a return to racial division in music. “When we were kids, loads of our music heroes were Black, and when we see working-class white bands now, it seems really segregated. So, we made this decision to sort of be into The Specials and Dexys again, Marley, soul and doo-wop stuff – that’s what we were into when we were 15, 16.”
The opening track, “Let the Music Play”, looks back to that time both lyrically and musically. “I've always wanted a track that is about listening to music, and smoking, and reminiscing. To me, it's almost like ‘Easy Skanking’ or something.” Written early on in the process, it set the tone for the album. “We were writing bits and we weren't really getting anywhere. James did that, and everyone just went, ‘That's what we need to do’, and then it snowballed from there.” It remains one of Power’s favourites. “You and Me (and the Beautiful Sea)” also harks back to The Coral’s earliest songwriting days. “Thematically, the album ties in with the documentary in that way – it almost goes hand-in-hand. A lot of the songs are in celebration of that time.”
James Skelly is usually the catalyst for the songs, says Power; sometimes, as with “Here Come the Tears”, he is the sole songwriter. “That's just a pure James tune. He's always been able to write about his life and his immediate surroundings really well. I think he came in and just played that.” Often, however, his original ideas were handed over to the rest of the band and “we batted them back and forth, trying to improve them”.
One of the last tracks to be written, “High Tide” was deliberately simplified during this process. “Most of the time with this album, there’s hardly any sophisticated chord shapes in it, by design. We had this thing where that was part of the verse, and then it went into this soulful chord change. It was brilliant but I was like, ‘It’s too head music – everything on the album’s got to be heart’.” James rewrote the verse to use just two chords and then brought it back to the rest of the band. “He started singing that, and then Ian got the beat. Paul Duffy started going, ‘Whoo-oo-oo’, which was the little refrain – it’s almost like the hook, because he was listening to a track of ‘Burning’ that morning – and it was just this amazing magic 30 minutes. And I did that piano riff that’s a solo. All the keyboard settings were the ones that were on at that moment, I’m sure all Molloy’s guitar sounds were, and it just happened.” For Power, the spontaneity and intuitiveness of that session sum up the ethos of 388. “I was like, ‘Fuck. That is the essence of the album’.”
By naming the album after the 1970s tape machine they used, The Coral draw attention to the deliberate imperfection of these recordings, with their background hiss, imprecise tuning and occasional mistakes. “Doing an album live in a room with barely any overdubs and mixing the same day – I don't know if anyone can do it, and if they can, I don't know if anyone can do it as well as us. We can't do a lot of things, but we can do that right now. So, you've got to play your best hand, haven’t you?” Power thinks that the authenticity of live recording may be their best chance to stave off the threat of AI. “Because even as good as AI will ever get, it will never be able to do that. It's about moments now, it’s all we can offer people that a machine can't – it’s a moment in a room recording that. I think there'll be a split where it's either fully AI or you just play in a room like jazz bands did, because you can't compete. I was listening to a band the other day, and it was like, ‘Ah, this is like Pink Floyd on Mars with the fucking Grateful Dead’ ... and then it was like, ‘Oh no, it’s AI.’ We’ve got more to offer, surely, as God's creatures, you know what I mean? At least we've got soul.”
The highlight of the job for Power is in the studio rather than on the stage. “All the magic’s there, and then you just hit the circuit – the rest of it is arguing what Travelodge you're staying in on the M6. But it's beautiful, it is.” He recalls walking home along the beach after the “High Tide” session, feeling awestruck by how they had “caught a song out of the air. That's probably the most I've ever experienced that. Sometimes you’ve got to force them to be born, but it just popped out.” He makes the process of writing and recording sound natural, uncomplicated and – most unusually – conflict-free. “It's funny, when we get together for an album, we sort of get into this hive mind where we’re operating as one thought process. The telepathy as you get older and you play together more, it becomes more profound in a way.” As The Coral celebrate their thirtieth anniversary, they seem to be stronger than ever. “At the end of the day, the music and the art of it is the most important thing. And that thing we built as kids, that pact we had as kids, it was like a blood oath, it was pure Goonies, and I can't shake it.”
Author: Rachel Goodyear