Despite that enviable youthful vigour however, they’re still noticeably more roadworn than the fresh-faced combo we met back in 2007 when their debut album Heroes Or Ghosts was released, a record that would eventually go platinum, spend 32 weeks on the Irish charts, and spawn a slew of hit singles, including the ubiquitous ‘San Diego Song’ (16 weeks in the Top 40).
The title tune of the new record, Tony Was An Ex-Con, is a tribute to the strange, silent Chicago bloke with Previous who drove the band from the West Coast to the East on that fateful US tour last year. Most album titles serve as some sort of mission statement, summing up the songs’ unifying theme. This one is different.
“It is, and I think that was one of the reasons we went for it,” Danny admits. “We were kicking around lots of different names. There were more obvious choices like ‘Someone Else’s Hands’ or maybe songs that had that album title feel about them, but ‘Tony Was An Ex-Con’ was one that didn’t, and one that we all agreed on. The biggest thing was we didn’t want to have a title that was like Heroes Or Ghosts, ’cos we knew the record wasn’t similar, and we didn’t want to have a sweeping statement. And as you say, a lot of people will ask about the title, and at least we have the story to tell.”
And it is a good story. There have been many great tour psychosis records – No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith, Aladdin Sane – but the phenomenon of the psycho van driver has, to my knowledge, never been addressed in rock ‘n’ roll. Imagine it: You roll into town for a blind date with the guy in whose hands you’ll place your life for the next few weeks, and he turns out to be the original Slim Shady.
Danny: “That was exactly it at the start. We got on well with him, we thought, ‘This guy’s just a bit weird or whatever,’ but as it progressed we realised that he was fully insane.”
Dave: “The main thing was he didn’t really say anything. We’d be running late for a gig and we’d be like, ’Where are we?’ and he wouldn’t answer you. Then towards the end it was pretty scary.”
Danny: “When we came home from America we demoed a lot of the songs, so I’d say a lot of the songs came out of that period. That’s the only way I can rationalise it.”
Presumably experiences like that knit the band together as a unit?
Dave: “Especially on a crappy little bus with bunks, no toilet. The trailer broke and we had all the gear in the bus, there was barely enough oxygen.”
Graham: “We were driving for 12 hours just lying in our bunks.”
Danny: “There were a couple of times where we were looking at the clock going: ‘Are we gonna make this gig? We haven’t got time to stop for a wee!’”
Is Tony aware of the dubious honour that’s been conferred upon him?
Dave: “Hopefully not, although probably some day he will!”
Danny: “He was born and bred in Chicago, he was an ex-convict, we’re not sure what for. We were afraid to ask because we were afraid to hear the truth. The only reason we found out he was an ex-con was when our trailer broke down we had to rent another one, and they wouldn’t rent him one. In the middle of nowhere.”
How long was the tour?
Danny: “San Francisco to New York. Down and up. We did six or seven gigs on the West Coast, three or four in the middle, Cincinnati, Kansas and Chicago and then a few on the East Coast. Everywhere we went was pretty good, there was no place we were disappointed by.”
Not one?
Dave: “Cincinnati got grim.”
That’ll be the third album title then. Still, one imagines American audiences respond well to The Coronas’ proudly unironic and emotional tunes.
Danny: “We were surprised at the crowds. We hadn’t anything to release over there, but everywhere we went they were much more receptive than the UK. In the UK the whole musical snobbery thing, and the fact that there’s so many bands over there... When we were in the States, whenever we did a gig, whoever was there seemed to be happy to see us, they’d stop and give you two minutes to win them over. We played the Boom Boom Room in San Francisco and the Double Door in Chicago. But I think you could be right, we’re definitely not a niche band releasing some little techno album, we definitely think that it could travel, and hopefully with this record we can spread out to other places with it.”
Those other places might include the Asian continent. As Graham explains: “We were over in Tokyo last March, we have a licensing deal there. So we played three showcase gigs, all brilliant, venues jammed, all about the size of The Village.”
Danny: “We couldn’t believe it, because we worked from the ground up here and we never had a massive record deal and we didn’t really have any hype or press, but it was such a different experience to go over there and see how it works to be signed to a label, on the same one as Feeder and the Prodigy. There was a crowd ready for us and they’d all this press organised and had the tune playing on certain radio stations. The gigs were all full and you could hear a pin drop, the crowd was so attentive and so quiet.”
Dave: “Even if the chord’s ringing and you’re not playing, you think the song’s over but they won’t start clapping until you put your hands on the strings to stop it.”
Danny: “We’re going back to Asia in November or January, we’ve got 17 gigs planned, it’s too good to be true. We’re starting in Singapore then going to Thailand, Taiwan, Cambodia, playing all these gigs.”
Let’s hope they have a saner van driver this time, or they really are up the Mekong.
The recording of Tony Was An Ex-Con was overseen by Muse, Supergrass and Razorlight producer John Cornfield. As the band readily admit, the circumstances of their alliance were seriously, seriously Jim’ll Fix It.
Danny: “It was funny because we didn’t know how you go about getting a producer to produce an album, and we literally made a list, started from the top down, and John was right up there on the top. We started Googling albums we liked and seeing who did them.”
Graham: “And his name kept popping up.”
Danny: “So we sent him an email and he got back straight away saying he’d listened to the demos and loved them and he’d like to do it. Joe Chester produced the first record, and Joe did an amazing job, we were thinking about going with him again, but we wanted to try and do something different. For how inexperienced we were in the studio, Joe really pulled that album out of us. We’d barely done any extensive touring at all. We had the songs but we didn’t really know what our sound was.
Dave: “But the approach in the studio in Cornwall was a lot different. We’d been gigging for two years since Heroes Or Ghosts and I think we definitely discovered our sound somewhere along the line, and when we went in we knew what the songs were and had the arrangements figured out in our head and it was already sounding good.”
The record, Danny says, was recorded near-as-dammit live, a rare thing in these days of digital editing, when it’s getting harder to find an engineer who knows how to mike a drum-kit, or a producer capable of drilling a young band to the point where they can get through a complete take.
Danny: “We knew we wanted the songs to come across like we were a rock band and not have that perfectly polished feel. And John is great that way. He’s such a big producer we thought he’d be there going, ‘Right lads, this is how we’re gonna do it. You go in there, you do this, change that,’ but he was really just like, ‘You’re the guitarist.’”
Dave: (adopting broad meat-and-potatoes English accent): “You’re the facking songwriter, you sort it out!”
Danny: “Even with the solos Dave would be going, ‘What do you think of that?’ and he’d be going (shrugs), ‘It’s the solo.’ I thought we’d be overdubbing tracks and tracks, but he wanted to keep it raw, kept going: ‘It’s all about the vibe. You can put four more guitars on it to make it sound good, or we can just get the right one.’ We put a bit of strings on top, but everything we can do live, everything was recorded in one room.”
It didn’t hurt that over the six-week duration of the recording sessions, the band had precious few distractions. Cornfield’s studio is a converted sawmill right in the middle of Straw Dogs territory in Cornwall.
Graham: ‘You have to get a boat out to it, you can’t drive to it. You have to walk along a railroad track.”
Danny: “We were surprised at the history of Cornwall – a lot of the people there feel like they’re another country, they’ve had serious battles with the English to try and get independence. The locals loved us straight away when we came in, the Irish boys. The whole thing with John, I sort of said to him at the start, ‘Do you want us to not drink or smoke during the recording?’ and he said, ‘No, whatever makes you most comfortable, whatever gets the most out of it.’ So we’d record for the day and go down to the pub and have a couple of pints and chat away with the locals, we were the youngest there by 20 years, just having a bit of banter and playing pool, and we’d go back and do it again the next day. I think we ended up having a day extra at the end. It’s usually the opposite: you ring up the record company and ask for three more days for mixing. It was such a chilled out experience.”
It’s not a necessarily a chilled out record, however. Even the love songs have a sort of cardio-vascular twist.
Danny: “Most love songs are about unrequited love, you can’t get the girl, but ‘Someone Else’s Hands’ is different because it’s actually about rejecting a girl because you love someone else. It was a different take on the whole situation, it’s usually the other way around.”
There’s no way to look nice in that scenario.
“Exactly! To anyone!”
The rest of the tunes conjure the image of the singer attempting to drag some errant mate out of a bad psychic funk. A shrink might divine in the Coronas’ songs a wariness of the darker side of the human psyche. In a way, the titular Tony is the guy half the people on the record might become if they’re not careful.
Danny: “I suppose we never really tried to get the whole album to have a subject matter, we have the tunes and they stand up by themselves, but because we spend so much time together the songs probably ended up sounding more friendship-y. The last song, ‘All the Luck In The World’, sort of has that vibe of coming together to beat everyone else type thing. Obviously there are love songs on it as well, but I think there’s a couple of tunes, like ‘This Is Not A Test’, that are about us as a band trying to make a good second record and trying to be there for each other and having the ambition to take over the world. It defintely has a more collaborative feel.”
And it is still an extraordinary act of faith for a group of musicians – or any aggregation of individuals involved in a collaborative creative enterprise – to pitch in together with no real guarantee of remuneration.
Danny: “It is, especially when you have a song that you have a connection with, and it’s hard to let go ‘cos you obviously have an idea in your head of how it’s gonna be. Even if I know Dave’s lyrics are better than the lyrics I had originally, sometimes it’s hard. We’re still learning at that kind of thing, and I think we’ve improved 100% from the first album. A song like ‘Tony’, I wrote all the music on the guitar and played it to Dave and he was sort of like, ‘It sounds like a bus traveling.’ And the next day we went for rehearsal Dave just whipped out this sheet, a full A4 page of the lyric, done. So there’s never a formula for us, it’s good to have that openness to it.”
So there we leave them, a Terenure band who can count the amount of critical rave reviews they’ve received on one hand, yet repeatedly sell out Irish tours and shift tons of records. The Coronas are that curious but irresistible case study: a people’s band.
“From the word go we never really had any massive critical acclaim,” Dave concludes. “It’s good that we always had a thick enough skin when it came to that, so we sort of just went out and did our own thing, we were never really involved in the whole Whelan’s clique. We did our college gigs from the ground up and it just seemed to work for us and our sound. It’s definitely the way to go. Just keep playing gigs and making music, hoping people will get it. So yeah... a band for the people!”