“We wanted it to be like Hawkwind”
The Coral’s James Skelly speaks to Stevie Chick.
You were working on a new album early in 2012, but ended up going on hiatus for four years instead. What happened? “We were burned out. We’d toured for 12 years, nonstop, and it was just madness, basically. We just had to take an eight-count, really; everyone just needed to do their own thing. Ian [Skelly, drummer] and Paul [Duffy, bassist] did a band called Serpent Power with Paul Molloy [now The Coral’s new guitarist], and I did an album [2013’s Love Undercover, credited to James Skelly & The Intenders] that all the lads played on, and I started up a label, Skeleton Key, and produced some bands.”
Did you know for sure you’d get back together and finish the album you’d started? “I knew we would get back together. But I didn’t have a clue when. Could have been 10 years, could have been 20… But last year I played a gig with Ian Broudie, and it was the first time I’d played with Bill [Ryder-Jones, The Coral’s former guitarist] in ages. And I said to him, Show me how you do that thing that sounds like sci-fi blues you used to do on our tunes… He was like, ‘It’s dead easy, you just pull down on the strings, instead of up.’ A few weeks later I wrote Chasing The Tail, and I was, like, crooning, in a way, over this weird riff, and I thought, This could be a Coral tune. And then me and Nick [Power, Coral keysman] started writing together, and I wrote a couple more with Ian, and it went from there.”
The album sees the debut of new guitarist Paul Molloy. What does he bring? “Molloy joined midway through. It was great, because the bits he added to the already-recorded songs were, you know, ‘tasteful’. He could have put his ego all over it, but everything he added was just the right thing. There’s a live jam he plays on at the end of Million Eyes, and we wanted it to be like Hawkwind, as in if there’s anything out of tune or if there’s any madness to it, then you leave it in – it just is what it is.”
The lyrics are dark. What are you dealing with here? “The Distance Inbetween is the unknown, the void, the abyss. The idea was, it’s like Ian Curtis’s lyrics: apocalyptic, but domestic, know what I mean? It’s almost like a nuclear bomb has gone off, but you’re in the kitchen… I don’t know, I can’t explain it. It’s like Gregory Crewdson’s photography, or like Richard Yates’s books – there’s someone on the train, but in their mind they’re in Ancient Sumeria. Err… It’s hard to explain, really.”