THEY get absolutely bloody everywhere, these Coral boys. Turn your back for so much as a second and another one of them has stepped out from beneath the psychedelic skirts of the main band to bring you their own personal set of finely crafted tunes.
Drummer Ian Skelly brought us his second, Drifter’s Skyline, just a fortnight back – and a dashingly and insouciantly good country-psych long player we found it too. (Here’s our review).
Now guitarist Paul Molloy is readying his album, The Fifth Dandelion, for release on the 21st of this month – and a wonderful electric candy shoppe of a psych-pop set that is as well – our review will be available for perusal on the afternoon of the 16th.
Just to tantalise your tastebuds, today he’s released the beautiful, painstakingly hand-cut animation for the equally swoonable “My Madonna”; which, if you have any love for the goings on of the late Sixties will hit you right in your village green-preserving chest.
It’s a real yearn of a tune, Paul’s voice clear and melodic over the piano melody as he offers up his vision of some beauty who takes him “up to the top of the stars / On a twilight ladder”. There’s whisky from a fountain in this cosmos where she’s so fine, yes she’s so right.
Paul himself appears in the video as a rocket-riding space explorer and valiant knight, with an aesthetic that draws on Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, the pullouts in the vinyl of The Kinks’ Arthur Or The Decline And Fall Of The English Empire; the Edwardian military repurposing of the swinging boutique Granny Takes A Trip.
He says: “‘My Madonna’ is really about my girlfriend; [it’s] written when we first started going out, a piano ode to all that’s good about her.
“Then my mum died and the piano in her house was where I practised those parts, before recording them in that room on a portable eight-track. So it took on the memory of my mum too, who was a huge music fan. She supported me in following this path; encouraging me to stay determined.”
Aww, paean and elegy in one three-minute pure psych rush. You’re unmoved? Tchah.
Paul’s The Fifth Dandelion will be released by Spring Heeled Records on digital and vinyl formats on Friday, August 21st; you can order one here.
