[The Zion Egg]: Articles (Press)

Article first published in The Face No59, December 2001.

Tonight I'm a Rock'n'roll star

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Text Mark Sutherland
Photography Ewen Spencer

You wait for ages for a good band... and then two come along at once. On tour and off their heads, The Music and The Coral are turning guitar pyrotechnics and school-age scallydelia into a Northern uproar you can really believe in.

'Music's been boring for too long. It's Saturday night, d'ya know what I mean? I want music that'll give me the time of my life, not just moan about the weather.'
Saturday night in Liverpool. Lee, 19, from Birkenhead, is holding forth about the state of British music. Tonight, he's shunned the local dance scene, where clubbers are doing their best to recreate Ibiza in the drizzly city, and passed on this year's great white hypes, Starsailor, playing across town at the L2. Instead he, and a couple of hundred others like him, are crammed into a tiny venue called The Picket to see two bands whose walk might just match the talk.
The bands are local heroes The Coral and, from Leeds The Music. In healthier times for British music, the traditional transpennine antipathy might have made these bands rivals. Indeed, while both groups have youth in common (no member of either is older than 20), their sounds are poles apart. What unites them is an attitude and belief that UK rock desperately needs a radical reboot.
And not a moment too soon. Since The Verve's split and the Gallagher brothers' creative paralysis, no guitar band has captured the public imagination in the way New Order, The Smiths or The Stone Roses did. Amid The Strokes, The White Stripes and upstart genres like UK garage and nu-metal, the only homegrown guitar music to get a look-in has come from maturing Britpoppers Pulp and The Charlatans, or polite rockers Travis, Coldplay and Turin Brakes.
But something's stirring in the underground this weekend. The talent of Leeds and Liverpool for breeding unique bands without the patronage of the London-based media and music business is well-established, and just by observing these two bands bantering away off-stage and blasting away on it, you know you're dealing with something truly authentic. The venue is thick with smoke, anticipation - and that modern-day rarity these day, a local following.

(...Talks about The Music...)

The Coral are form Hoylake, 15 minutes away, and they're not about to be upstaged on home turf. They dominate the dressing room with ceaseless gabbling and impromptu jamming, and dominate the stage with the same ultratight gang dynamic that informed the Happy Mondays. Singer James Skelly is the spit of a young Lee Mavers from The La's, while the others look like they should be on the rob with Tinhead in Brookie. They play guitars, sure, but also brass, keyboards and percussion. The Coral don't even hold their instruments like anyone else. If The Music already look like the Rough Guide to life-affirming Northern guitar rock, then the Coral are the full ten-volume Encyclopaedia Psychedelia: no sound, style or influence is too strange for them to plunder.
Previous single 'Shadows Fall' and new offering 'The Oldest Path' represent some of the most original British rock music in years, sounding like the doors and The Specials , simultaneously. They even pull off an insane cover of Bob Marley's 'Get Up Stand Up', complete with an appearance from their very own Bez-sytle dancer, Woy-Yoy Boy (Phil to his mum).

(...Talks about The Music...)

Doing what the fuck they want also forms a central plank of The Coral's manifesto. They too formed at school (in 1996) and have preferred to develop organically in their home town rather than migrate to London. Strike up a conversation with any of them - James, drummer Ian Skelly, keyboard player Nick Power, guitarists Bill Ryder-Jones and Lee Southall or bassist Paul Duffy - and their enthusiasm for music, football, books, anything, is irresistible: all six talk at once, and so do their road crew. It's easy to mistake The Coral for just another bunch of scally rockers. What sets them apart is a blue-eyed fervour they share with all Scouse dreamers, from Ian McCulloch to Robbie Fowler.
'Music has been in a terrible state,' declares James. 'Linkin Park are awful - they're playing to a formula on every song and I just can't relate to it. They're like the evil spawn of Kurt Cobain's shit. We could die tomorrow, so we want to record an album like Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue or Love's Forever Changes. We don't want to be one of those bands that sound good at the time but sound dated in the future. We want our music to always sound amazing. Timeless.'
They'll probably do it, too, despite their ages: James is 20, the others either 17 or 18. their bewildering palette of influences - a bit Beach Boys here, a little Gorky's there - and an approach to songwriting which incorporates sea shanties as comfortably as it does punk, has lead to no shortage of offers from major labels. They say they're being pursued by 25 labels, yet they're in no greater hurry to sign than they are to play the supposedly crucial London gigs.
'It's too long a van journey,' grins James. 'We're too lazy. But no, we'll play there when we can pack out somewhere, not when we're doing some shit place in front of ten people. London's no better than Wolverhampton or Wrexham.'
Tonight they walk out on stage in front of 500 or so curious music fans, a crowd a little older and a lot more obviously 'indie' than the previous night. Even so, as their unlikely anthem 'Get Up Stand Up' erupts through The Warehouse, there's little doubting The Coral's capacity to connect.
The Music also rise to the challenge, their main weapon being riffs so powerful and elongated you'd assume Jimmy Page was in the wings, surreptitiously plugged into their guitar amps. Whatever; it's impossible to miss in such a display of confidence the start of something real. Forget Manchester 1988 nostalgia tour; this is the Liverpool-Leeds express, 2001. Get on board right now.
'I'll be keeping my gig ticket,' nods Ceri, 18, from Oulton. 'Both bands will be massive and everyone will be pretending they came to this. Well, I'll have the proof'