The Coral - 'Put The Sun Back'
Ah, the '60s! A wonderful era for popular music. All the babies born to the returning soldiers from World War II were in their teens - and there were LOADS of them too - and all they wanted to do was frug to the go go beat of their latest fave rave beat combos. Their parents didn't like their long hair, but they were square, so who cared? And recording technology made a sudden leap from one microphone plugged into one tape machine (or disc-cutter) to complicated, layered recordings, rendered in amazing quality, and played on expensive equipment which the Dansette obsessives called 'hi-fi'.
It was a time of looking as far forward as you possibly could, and leaving the attitudes and responsibilities of the past to the people who had lived through it (the war had only been finished 20 years by the time the Beatles had conquered America. Kylie Minogue has been releasing records for longer than that).
There was no such thing as 'retro', or if there was, it was in the context of subversive or comical retreads of old songs from the '30s, as performed by bands such as the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, or the Beatles doing 'When I'm 64' as a camp joke.
Also, because there was such a massive audience for music, and a common desire to break down barriers and grab hold of anything that smelled of the future, there was a relatively huge audience for artists who were attempting to create new and thrilling fusions and formulas for music, from Miles Davis to Captain Beefheart.
And mainstream artists - who had just as much reason not to rock the boat as, say, McFly have today - were doing it too. If you've not heard the Beatles song 'Tomorrow Never Knows', in which they invent the Chemical Brothers 25 years early, using just magnetic tape, bass and a real drummer, well give it a go, eh? It's not unlike cavemen inventing a mobile phone, and making a better job of it than Nokia do now.
I mention all of this because the Coral clearly know all of these things already. There's nothing you could tell the Coral about the '60s that they don't already know. If you cut them, they bleed in black and white. And this was fine when they released their first album, because the gene pool of '60s acts they were drawing inspiration from was big enough to allow them to create their own sound out of everyone else's. Plus they brought a healthy dose of olde worlde sea shanty lunacy with them, to distract from the authentic bowl-cuts and deliberate, well-worn psychedelia.
Nowadays there's very little of that sense of wild abandon to the Coral's music. They're probably better songwriters now, in the sense of crafting high-quality bespoke songs in the way a carpenter makes a table, but it's a bit like choosing to go with a reproduction chair when there are still loads of Chippendale originals in the shops for the same price. What you want is either a different, improved, new kind of chair, or the original.
None of this is meant maliciously, by the way. I've always had loads of time for James Skelly, the Coral's leader. Partly because he once told the NME his favourite album of all time is by Wet Wet Wet (if it's a prod at indie-snobs, more power to him, and if it's true, who are we to argue?), partly because he refused to wave back when Coldplay waved at them when both bands were on TOTP, and partly because he seems a really open-minded fellow in a pretty closed-minded indie world.
But his band's music, while sweet, doesn't do anything with the template it works from. Which probably means, ironically, that if the band had existed in the '60s, their lack of fresh ideas would consign them to a bargain bin quicker than you can say "groovy, man".
More madness next time, please!
Download: Out now
CD Released: February 11th
(Fraser McAlpine)
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