Ryder On The Storm

Billy Ryder-Jones is screaming along an Alpine pass at the wheel of something soft-topped and elegantly British, his two-tone scarf flapping languorously in the wind. In the passenger seat, a groupie brushes her tresses from her face while attempting to simultaneously administer a manicure and mix a martini.

She’s about to fetch an olive from the glove compartment when ­­– parp parp – their reverie is interrupted by the presumptuous bleeping of a phone clipped to the walnut dashboard. Another bloody journalist! Adjusting his driving-goggles, Ryder-Jones prepares to take the call, his foot pressing instinctively on the accelerator. The mountains blur past as though in a hurry to leave.
None of this is actually happening, yet as Ryder-Jones howls down the phone line, his patter half-obscured by a roaring engine and a groaning wind, it certainly feels as if it could be. The Coral guitarist is apparently driving in the hills with a chum – it sounds like he’s speaking from the bottom of a bungee-chord or the top of a crane.
“Hello! Hello!,” he yelps against a crackle that is possibly a bad line but which suggests several avalanches occurring at once. “Yer alright mate? I’m in me car. We’ve just gone around a corner – you dropped out on me there for a second. Can you hear me now...?”
Something squeals and bleats in the background. It’s probably the brakes, though maybe they’ve just chucked a puppy overboard to lighten the load.
As an introduction to The Coral the moment could not be more apt. Phone interviews with musicians are often exercises in predictability – grabbing a word with Ryder-Jones, however, is tantamount to donning a pair of psychedelic mirror-shades and plunging off a ledge.
But then The Coral, a sprawling Mersey band (they were, at last count, seven strong) with a fondness for absurdist psychedelia, are not like other groups.
At once merry and menacing, their dense, anxious arrangements have the character of a dark nursery rhyme. It is music that seems safe and dangerous at the same time. Had Lewis Carroll written Alice In Wonderland as a high-kitsch rock-operetta, the score would sound not dissimilar to The Coral.
With their new album, The Invisible Invasion, they have produced one of those rare records that insists you stop whatever you are doing and quietly submit to its power. The sonic palette is bleak, ever-shifting – the sound of a bad dream refusing to ebb away.
“Yeah, we were determined to make a really great album this time,” yells Ryder-Jones as his driver executes a hand-brake turn and narrowly avoids an oncoming oil tanker (or maybe he doesn’t – the line is rather patchy). “Don’t get me wrong, we’re very proud of the [previous two] records. Still, there was definitely a sense of wanting to put together something that would really stand up to a lot of scrutiny. This is an important moment in our career. We made this record so that it would be bullet proof. For the first time, we are having to deal with a degree of expectation – from the audience and from the media. We needed to be at the top of our game.”
Swaddled in scatter shot arrangements, fragments of melody drifting through at strange moments, Invisible Invasion offers a master-class in shamoblic elegance. Somewhat surprisingly, the producer is Geoff Barrow, who, as steward of Portishead, set a watermark for hushed minimalism.
A perfectionist whose songs are usually conveyed in delicate brushstrokes of sound, Barrow has used his time with The Coral to deploy an entire paint-pot of ideas.
“One thing Geoff had a great appreciation for is the importance of individual instruments,” says Ryder-Jones. “Because we are such a large band there have perhaps been times when the contribution of some of the guys got muddled in the mix. But Geoff took care that everything came out. He really was painstaking in how he put the entire album together.”
Ryder-Jones speaks in a thick, mellifluous Liverpool accent and, although they are actually from the Mersey satellite town of Hoylake, there is a tendency to portray The Coral as scouse chavs who have swapped their dole cards for guitars, washboards and the other paraphernalia of a novelty group.
The temptation to stereotype the band is doubly strong in view of their age and background: none of them are over 25 (Ryder-Jones recently turned 20 and could pass for five years younger), and they fell into The Coral while mucking around at bus stops near the sink estates where they grew up.
“There’s been a lot of really lazy press about us,” says Ryder-Jones. “People hear our accents and see that we’re young and spotty and then all these prejudices come out in the way they write about us. We’ve never nicked anyone’s stereo and we didn’t spend all our time sitting around smoking dope before we joined the band. Okay, we’re still kids in many ways. Does that mean we can’t be mature about making music?”
Yet their origins do exert an influence, one subtler than Ryder-Jones’ scally patter suggests.
The Coral tap Liverpool’s murky past as an Atlantic gateway and slave trade seat; their songs have been described as ‘sea-shanties’ and while this is largely journalistic hyperbole the music unquestionably possesses a tang of salty mystery.
On the Invisible Invasion in particular, Liverpool’s ghosts loom tall in the brine. The record is a macabre suite, a death, rattle and roll excursion into the shadowy places that lurk in the margins of the mundane.
“I wouldn’t agree we would not have existed without Liverpool – I think that’s too much of a generalization, about both the city and our music," counters Ryder-Jones. That said, you can tell that we are scousers. It’s certainly been an influence, although by no means the strongest one. To be honest, I think our background has a bigger effect on our outlook and how we conduct ourselves as a band than on our actual song-writing.”
For all their size, The Coral are passionately democratic. In the studio, each member is an equal contributor, explains Ryder-Jones. The group are jealous guardians of the idea of The Coral, he says, insisting that their creative control is all encompassing (drummer Ian Skelly designs the record sleeves and the band have a hands-on role in their videos).
“We’ve always had the sense that The Coral should be a rounded product,” says Ryder-Jones. “It’s not just about individual songs – it’s about the way that music comes together on an album, about how the record is packaged and presented. We don’t make concept albums, but there is certainly a concept behind The Coral. Although I’m not quite sure anyone could articulate exactly what that is.”