ALTHOUGH The Coral come from the sleepy coastal town of Hoylake on the Wirral Peninsula, nearby Liverpool has hosted many of their musical adventures. Here, the melodic Merseysiders found gigs, recording facilities and a world of possibilities. “Once we started going to Liverpool and coming back, we kind of reflected it back to people,” considers Nick Power (keyboards), over a cuppa. “People thought, ‘Wow, they’re going to do something.’ ’Cos nothing ever happened where we live. Before that, people got laughed at if they tried to do something out of the ordinary.”
Today, The Coral are in Maggie May’s café on Bold Street, a favoured haunt whenever they’re recording in the ’Pool. With its traditional signage and homemade scouse, the longstanding “community café” is a homely haven amidst the area’s smarter restaurants and sushi bars – as earthy, unshowy and friendly, in fact, as The Coral are themselves. Power and singer James Skelly have met Uncut here to talk and walk us through some of the locations where they made not one but two fabulous new albums.
Twenty-one years after their eponymous debut gatecrashed the Top 5, their 11th – and possibly best – album Sea Of Mirrors is being released simultaneously with a more experimental 17-track effort, Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show – a spin-off of sorts from 2021’s No 2 double album Coral Island. Evidently, The Coral are undergoing the sort of creative explosion very few bands experience after this long in the game.
“They were so talented from the beginning and they’ve just got better and better,” says Life On Mars actor John Simm, who’s followed the band since their days in tiny clubs. “I thought Coral Island was their masterpiece, but they’re constantly morphing into something else.”
That album, inspired by the concept of a fictional seaside town is even more beautifully elegiac. Meanwhile, – which Skelly sees as “the ultimate Coral B-sides album” – employs the format of a fictional late-night radio show. After first appearing on , the Skellys’ 87-year old grandfather Ian Murray, aka The Great Muriarty, turns DJ, while songs with titles such as “The Sinner” and “Leave This Town” tell the stories of imaginary “” and others marooned by changing times. But dig into the songs and they tell a deeper story.
