The Coral have recruited Cillian Murphy and John Simm for their two upcoming new albums.
‘Sea Of Mirrors’, the British group’s 11th studio album, will drop on September 8th, and the ‘Peaky Blinders’ star has a spoken word part on the record’s closing song ‘Oceans Apart’.
Due to the album’s spaghetti western influence, The Coral initially wanted to enlist actors Frank Nero and Terence Hill on the song, but after being turned down, they turned to Cillian after co-producer Sean O’Hagan revealed he worked on the actor’s first film.
Frontman James Skelly told NME: “Sean was like, ‘Oh I know someone. I did his first film. He might be good – Cillian Murphy.’ and I was like, ‘What? One of the best actors in the world?’
“And then Cillian Murphy just emailed and was like, ‘Ah, yeah I love the band, I’m up for helping you out.’
“Then we just had a conversation about what it was going to be, because we needed help with it. We were speaking about books we liked and films and how you build a character. He went away and thought about the character and tried different things.
“He just sent what he did for the album and said it should be like an old sort of American actor like Bella Lugosi or Buster Keaton. The idea was these massive stars ended up in these B-movies. And they were like, ‘Where is my life?’ That’s the idea, this internal thing of, ‘How did I get here?’ He just nailed it and we put it in the track and put some reverb on it. We were like ‘Nice one Cillian, thanks a lot, you put the cherry on top.’ “
For the group’s other upcoming album ‘Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show’ – a spin-off project connected to their 2021 record ‘Coral Island’ – the band enlisted ‘Life on Mars’ star and “early champion of the band” John for a spoken word part on song ‘Drifters Prayer’, after keyboardist Nick Power sent the actor a message.
James added: “He said yeah and he came down, did it, just nailed it perfectly and I was like, ‘Ah that’s what a professional looks like.’ We just hung out for a bit, lovely fella.
“Cillian and John are both great actors. If I was cast in a film I’d be looking at them two. It’s that thing when you work with or you see a true top of the level professional work, you feel privileged and lucky to have even had a little hint of working with that.”