Interview: The Coral are back from the brink

You can tell that The Coral have grown up together. In the dressing room where we meet, where the six members have been passing time during filming for The Friday Night Show, they come across as a brotherly gang. Casually slouching, surrounded by boxes of left-over pizza crusts, the lead singer and principal songwriter James Skelly mumbles between picking bits of today's lunch out his mouth and scratching his crotch. They may have achieved an impressive eight chart hits, but, clearly, success has not gone to their heads. Now the lads from Hoylake in Merseyside, who formed The Coral 11 years ago are on the verge of releasing their fifth album, Roots & Echoes, and it could well be their most cohesive and soulful effort to date.

At 26, Skelly is the oldest band member and was just 20, (the youngest member was 16) when the band signed their record deal. A Mercury Music Prize nomination for their 2002 debut, four top-five albums, much touring (and excessive smoking of weed) down the line and the band found themselves exhausted. When their guitarist, Bill Ryder-Jones, quit touring due to personal difficulties in 2005, it was time things were put on hold for the band to do some thinking.

Skelly reflects: "We hadn't stopped until after the last album. Everyone was like, 'what's going on?'. We had a big break. We didn't know what was going on with the band. Now we've been around the world, done all these things, and we've stopped and had a chance to take it all in for the first time."

The simple reason, the keyboardist and songwriter Nick Power explains, was being in a contract aged 18 and "winding up" at 22. The band had lost that sense of brotherly unity and, according to Skelly, had found themselves on "different pages".

"No one argued with anyone for about two years, and that was one of the worst points," he recalls. "Everyone had become individuals. We got off the roller-coaster in the end. Then we could start making an effort to get it back together again, like a band. It's an attitude. It's something you can all tap into instead of on your own."

The way Skelly and Power interact, completing each other's sentences and continuing the other's train of thought, shows that the band's period of distant tension is over. And they have rediscovered the hunger.

"You've all just got to get on it and want it again. You're all there and you want to practice and you want to do music and you want to get it out there to people again," Skelly says. "You take it for granted for so long when you're doing it. It's the best thing you'll probably ever do in your life," adds Power.

"Yeah, it is," agrees Skelly. "When we're all together it's like a rare thing that no one else has got, because we were all mates since we were kids."

When Ryder-Jones left the band mid-tour, David McDonnell temporarily played guitar. While everyone accepted Ryder-Jones's need for time out, according to Skelly, gigging without him was "like having a fight with your arm behind your back. McDonnell's an amazing guitarist but he'll tell you himself it can never be the same, because the Coral is about a friendship and about tapping into that thing."

Skelly wanted to be writing songs rather than touring and the band found themselves fracturing. He recalls: "Performing was pissing me off because I wanted to be writing. I was only interested in Dylan Thomas. But you've got to get out there and sing because that's part of why people like you."

Skelly, though, remains resolute and realistic now. "Every band has to go through that point and come out of it. You have to reinvent yourselves."

It took some time to build up to where they started, but with the help of their fans the Gallaghers, who lent them free use of their Wheeler End studios to record the album, they pulled through. After the break Skelly resumed songwriting with Power, Ryder-Jones rejoined them and, before long, they were discussing things and writing as in the early days before they were signed. When the whole band played live together again for the first time at the end of 2006, The Coral were complete.

Skelly recalls the significant moment: "We hadn't played with Bill for ages. We did this gig at Christmas and we played together live and the crowd just went mental. It was like, we're a band again! It was like a new lease of life for everyone, I could see it in everyone and everyone's confidence went up and we started writing more then."

There is a strong sense that, aside from The Coral being in their blood, they feel that they owe their music to the public. Skelly says: "I think we're one of the few bands that can go into the mainstream with different types of music and interesting music. People deserve good music. When the Beta Band quit, I was gutted. They were one of the few bands that were doing something different. I think the best thing about The Coral is we take strange influences and make it accessible."

One of the most celebrated aspects to The Coral's music is their authenticity, incorporating the late Sixties psychedelia of Love's Arthur Lee and Scott Walker while making it sound their own. Skelly says: "If you're original then your music's going to be original, because you're playing it."

Their music is full of literary references – take "Far From the Crowd" after Thomas Hardy, and "A Warning to the Curious", after a story by the horror writer MR James. "I always read books," Skelly insists. "You should always read books, listen to music and watch films if you're doing art. The kind of bands who don't know any tunes, who don't know any films... well what do you do then, what are you? They think music started with The Clash."

The Coral famously cram various musical styles into one song. After the dark psychedelia of the Krautrock-inspired The Invisible Invasion and the off-the-wall experimentalism of Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker (both of which they refer to as "mad", "weird" and "insane"), they have returned with a more straightforward album that mirrors the brighter future of the band.

Power says: "We wanted to go in opposite directions to the last two albums, which ended up being quite dark. We didn't feel the need to depress anyone." Skelly agrees: "When you've been in a bit of darkness you just want to see a bit of light. There's no more experimental we could go without it being a blip. We just wanted to nail it down. All our fans like different aspects of us and I think this album's got all aspects of us, but I think we needed an album that makes sense of everything, that you can kind of grab onto as a whole. I think it is our most consistent album."

"But we're not saying it's a pop album," Power says with a warning twinkle in his eye.

Of their new material, they are proudest of "Music at Night" and "Rebecca You", for their first use of violins. For playing live, "She's Got a Reason" is Skelly's favourite. "It's got the highs, lows and at the end it just has it. The guitar solo's just boss." They have another 40 tunes recorded that they couldn't fit onto Roots & Echoes. Their next plan is to release an album of death-folk, but learning from past experience with Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker, they will release it under another name. Skelly says: "You can't confuse people. You know when you're doing mad tunes that not everybody's going to be into it."

They readily admit they have learnt a lot over the past five years, and the band have emerged the better for it. Looking back to his youthful impatience when they had just completed their first album, Skelly says: "I was, like, come on, let's do something else. There was a different sort of thing I wanted to do, but I wasn't good enough or wasn't experienced enough to do it."

Power says: "That's why it's come full circle now. I think we've done a lot of learning."

And the future of the Coral? "It's just our life," Power shrugs. Skelly agrees. "I think a lot of bands don't live the music. They could be accountants or they could be doing other things, but we couldn't do anything else."

'Roots & Echoes' is released on 6 August on Deltasonic.

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