James has written a track by track of the second disc of The Singles Collection, Mysteries and Rarities. Click 'Read More' to take a look.
The album will be released Sep 15, you can preorder your copy here.
All The Birds Have Flown
This was an outtake from Roots & Echoes. I'd written it quite early on during the album sessions and I really wish we'd put it on the album to be honest and I'm quite gutted that we didn't. It was written as this weird kind of Leonard Cohen song, we got it together quickly, it sounded good in the batch of first tunes for the LP and we did a demo and it sounded good, we recorded it with Ian Broudie and then with [producer] Craig [Silvey], which is the version on this CD. We just over listened to it and because of that it never made the album and it's better than some of the songs on it. I wanted it to be a single but it didn't get a great reaction (laughs). The story is like Eleanor Rigby. It's about this woman in Liverpool who fed the pigeons and she'd talk to herself and I'd think is she there or am I the only one who sees her. The image stuck in my head.
The Golden Bough
This was written at the same time as we were recording Roots & Echoes. I loved the song, I thought it was really good, we've change it around a bit since that time, but if they ever call a James Bond film, The Golden Bough, it would be a good soundtrack track to that. It's inspired by the book [by Sir James George Frazer], about the link between magic and religion and science, that was the idea behind it, and also it was about thinking you're friends with someone but when it matters you only thought they were there, but they never were.
Michael's Song
This was inspired by A Perfect Day For Bananafish by JD Salinger and I just wanted to write a song that captured the feel I got from that book then me and Nick finished it off. It turned out like half Harry Nilsson and half Neil Young. JD Salinger's one of the best, he's really original, he takes a bit from F Scott Fitzgerald yet he has this mood that no one else has. The song's about a girl in a hotel, she's run away and her mum's worried about her. That's all I'm saying as I don't want to give it away.
Cry Of The City
This was recorded in our practice room in Hoylake, it started off a bit like John Martyn, that's where the inspiration came from, but I can't play guitar like him and it turned out nothing like him, but we just started playing on it and within an hour we had the whole tune arranged and we just recorded it the following week.
Everybody's Talkin'
Fred Neil is one of our favourite writers. I was watching the Sopranos and they had his Dolphins on it and I just thought that was one of the best tunes I'd ever heard so I went off and bought his album, his other albums were a bit more straight and folky but that LP with Dolphins on [1967's second album Fred Neil] is amazing. We covered it because we were on a radio show and we needed a cover on the day and it was going out live and I just knew the chords to that tune so we sort of just jammed it and then we did it at an acoustic gig, at the Isle Of Man and then recently at the Coliseum in London. The Isle Of Man was a terrible gig, we only did two good songs and they were both covers and they're on this release.
Far From The Crowd and She's Got A Reason
We recorded our second album Magic And Medicine in Elevator studios in Liverpool, we did a whole set there for a documentary and we did the last tune we recorded with Bill there called The Watcher In The Distance. These were the two best recordings from the session so I wanted to include them.
Return Her To Me
This is an outtake from Magic And Medicine, I think it was the one the record company wanted to release as a single but at the time we didn't want them to do that, but it's a good song when you listen back. At the time I thought it was a bit too much of a pastiche of a soul tune but now I see in the right context its great.
Monkey To The Moon
We were recording The Invisible Invasion, and this was the first track we did with producers Geoff Barrow and Ade Utley, we went to their studio in Bristol and just knocked this one down and Geoff mixed it, and I think this is the monitor mix. We were so in tune, we all chipped in on the writing, it started out as a kind of Beefheart tune. We usually all arrange a tune but with this one we all wrote it together too, we did it all as one thing. You have to be fully functioning as a unit to be able to work that way. We came up with the title in a taxi somewhere, we were laughing at it, and just wrote a tune around it.
It Was Nothing
It's a great tune, like The Beatles if they were some kind of Spanish groove group. It was recorded with Geoff Barrow.
Cobwebs
An 8 track demo, and a very early demo of it, recorded when Bill was away the first time, and we were just demoing stuff in his absence. This demo is as good as the proper version, it's kind of like Under Milk Wood.
Simon Diamond
This is definitely in my top Coral tunes. In a way it's the ultimate Coral tune. It started out as a joke when we were kids, about this guy who worked in my mum and dad's pub, and musically it's kind of like the Beach Boys crossed with the Wicker Man, crossed with a bit of dub, kind of everything we were into. We recorded it in Pink studios in Liverpool at the same session as Shadows Fall. No one seemed to have that Edward Lear British thing going on, no one except us seemed to be doing it since Syd Barrett and The Beatles.
Shadows Fall instrumental
This is a 4 track instrumental demo, recorded in Ian's bedroom. It's Ian, Lee, Paul and Bill, it's like Smile played by weird reggae and dub musicians. We were all 15, 16, 17 and who else at that age could make music like that? Our aim was to set up this other kind of world, be like David Lynch, Tom Waits, it was somewhere you could escape into.
Calendars And Clocks
The demo is really good and I almost wish we could record that one again because we've only got it really good in the last few years we've been playing with it, because it's just so ambitious, but that's what's so good about it. The demo is closer to how we play it now. We used a lot of our ideas on that song (laughs). Influences; the chords are off a Frank Sinatra song, It Was A Very Good Year, Nick thought of the title and I wrote the song around that. We were into The Good, The Bad And The Ugly at the time and we arranged the middle bit like that but mostly it just came from our brains really.
Seagulls
That was Lee and Ian from about 2000, they wrote it and Lee is on vocals and it's a really good song. Lee is a great singer, he should sing more but he shirks it sometimes. I think on the next album we're all going to sing a bit, it's going to be more of a group thing.
We just forgot about this song and only found it when we were looking for demos for this collection.
Dreaming Of You
It's bad quality, the guy who ran our record company lost the original DAT and so this is taken from a cassette tape. You can see there's a verse missing, but it's a work in progress and it's interesting to see how our songs develop. The song's one of the best things we've done, I think of it like [Dion's] The Wanderer or Run Around Sue. I never get sick of singing it. Sometimes you just want music to be like this, and when you get something good like this you can't beat it. But it's the hardest thing to do, to write a melodic pop song that everybody likes. It's much easier to write something dark and moody. Tim Hardin is an amazing songwriter, you can't get better than Bob Dylan, and there's Noel Gallagher too. Supersonic, that's just unbelievable. When I was 15 I heard that Oasis's Shakermaker was nicked off an advert so I tried to write a song with two chords robbed off an Alton Towers ad. It's probably the shitiest tune I've ever written. But two years later I wrote Pass It On.
It's In Your hands
A 1999 demo, recorded in Bill's house, from before we were signed. It was a really great time, great fun. We were smoking loads of weed, making music and drinking cups of tea. It's not really a good song but we wanted to include it because it's got loads of character, and it shows where In The Morning came from just a few years later.
Reward Live
This is terrible quality, but you get the spirit of it. It's from some lad in the crowd my mate knows. You can only really hear Lee having it on the guitar but that's great. We were supporting Echo and the Bunnymen in Liverpool in 2001. They asked us at the time and I hadn't really heard them, only songs like The Cutter and I thought they were Goths but now they're one of my favourite bands. I also love the Teardrop Explodes and thought that would be a good tune to do. At the time in Liverpool it was all 'the Teardrop Explodes aren't rootsy enough', but it's bullshit, they're boss.
Bye Bye Love Live from the Isle Of Man
This was one of the first tunes we learned to harmonise on. The Everly Brothers, they're kind of underrated, you never see an article written about them, and considering they're the best harmony duo of all time, there's really not enough said about them. They're innovative arrangers too. I still remember first hearing them. I was at a mate's barbecue and someone put on When Will I Be Loved? and it blew my mind. Their voices were coming out of this little speaker and it just sounded amazing. I've bought everything they've done as time has gone by.