OUT FRIDAY: The Coral's Paul Molloy's track-by-track guide to 'The Madmen Of Apocalypso'
The Coral’s Paul Molloy announces Dixieland-meets-droids and drones single, Artificial Intelligence, and offers a track-by-track guide to second solo album…
The Madmen Of Apocalypso
Paul Molloy – The Madmen Of Apocalypso
OUT THIS WEEK - Fri 6 September 2024
Spring Heeled Records
www.springheeledrecords.com
If the future’s not bright it will at least be danceable as The Coral’s Paul Molloy releases his second solo album, The Madmen Of Apocalypso, 11-tracks of woozy-folk-ragtime-Dixieland-jazz-vaudeville-Spy-Fi-baroque-60’s-pop, neatly taking a scythe to the 21st Century’s bloated excesses, psychological messes and digital excesses. Making sense and nonsense of it all, Molloy offers listeners a track-by-track run down of the inspirations, fascinations and machinations of writing, performing and recording the album.
A monster mash-up of genres, moods and cautionary tales, The Madmen Of Apocalypso reverses through the jet age, zooming back to the 1920’s, soaking up the sounds of New Orleans dives and speakeasys before rushing back through mid-century dancehalls, valve-fired 60’s pop factories and acid-hued, eccentric, character-led British songwriting.
Having treated listeners to the high-kicking, Kinksian, Mariachi ode to American disaster property prospecting, Luxury Bunker, and the dance-crazed, hot-stepping to Heaven calypso rock and roll of Apocalypso, the former Zutons, The Stands and Serpent Power guitarist chooses a further release day single. Focused on AI and the humiliation of mankind by robots to lead listeners into the album, Artificial Intelligence has been picked out to lead the charge.
Marking the release of the follow up to 2020’s sought-after debut, The Fifth Dandelion, the Merseyside-based multi-instrumentalist offers his own guided tour of The Madmen Of Apocalpyso as follows:
1 - Doomsday Bottle of Wine
“This song was the genesis of the whole concept and theme of the album. A neighbour of mine was skint during COVID and asked if I could get him some booze. So, I got him a bottle of wine and left it in his hall. When I got back to my flat the words jumped into my head ‘Doomsday Bottle of Wine’ which I felt like I’d just provided him with and which everyone else seemed to be drinking at the time. I picked up my guitar and it formed into a kind of Charleston-esque Dixieland jazz tune. Dystopian Dixieland jazz.”
2 - When The Fatman Sings
“A slightly different spin on the ‘It ain’t over till the Fat Lady Sings’ colloquialism but arriving at a similar conclusion: the end of the world. In this case the ‘Fatman’ personifies the greed of the seven deadly sins. The puppet masters and banksters that are so blinded by their megalomania and greed that they fail to recognise that their ‘power’ will not grant them a golden afterlife, or all the money and wealth in the world will not resurrect them from the grave.”
3 - Hey Nancy
“Mourning the loss of my dad, my grief was broken when my girlfriend arrived with her niece ‘Nancy’ who insisted on us giving her some raisins we kept in a jar. I picked up a ukulele from the corner and called her “Hey, Nancy, look at this!”. The fundamental chords and melody formed there and then and, when I returned to it the following days, it pretty much wrote itself; me assembling a bunch of brilliant quotes she had uttered in real life to people. “Dracula he’s just obsessed with me” was one.”
4 – Apocalypso
“This track plays a central role in the album. A bit of wordplay, it’s essentially a send up dance craze tune à la the Macarena, Watusi, The Monkey, Jerk or The Twist, but set to a calypso rock n’ roll beat with inverted Biblical lyrics and mariachi horns. A new-fangled dance that grants the participants access to Heaven when they die, depending on their level of skill at the dance. With the dance judge being none other than St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, it embraces the idea that no matter how hard we try, we seem unable to stop ourselves on being hellbent on destruction.”
5 - Luxury Bunker
“The song is about an extremely delusional and paranoid man (probably suffering from PTSD) who is under the illusion that the human race is depending on him and on his survival, solely, to avoid complete extinction. He therefore acquires himself a hazmat suit and builds a ‘Luxury Bunker’ which he never emerges from again. Even to take out the bins. It came about when my girlfriend, Fiona, was watching a TV programme about a guy who was renovating old war bunkers in America and turning them into luxury homes in the future event of apocalypse and catastrophe. We thought it was hilarious, so a week later it got brought up again and the title ‘Luxury Bunker’ found its way into the conversation and I thought: ‘I need to write this.’”
6 - Apocalypse Rag
“This is the ‘rag’ of the album. Ragtime and Dystopian Dixieland combine in a Mardi-Gras celebrating our imminent demise and all the ways and possibilities of how this could come about. Meteorites and Marmite clash with Grim Reapers, gamma rays, typhoons and megalomaniac buffoons. But everyone at the jamboree agrees on one thing: ‘Everybody’s doin’ it’.”
7 - Little Green Men
“A song about the alien invasion. My attempt to merge the soundtrack of a British spy movie with an Andy Williams-type song. A kind of ‘Spy-Fi’ song, if you like, in which attempts to save world by secret agents are ill-fated and who instead get distracted and fall madly in love with British racing car green coloured femme fatales from outer space.”
8 - Artificial Intelligence
“This song outlines the possibility of the human race being over overtaken by self-replicating AI robots. Evil, self-serving, power-hungry ones at that as well! Ones that can multitask; skip, dance and make love, whilst simultaneously changing a plug and bringing sheer humiliation and obsolescence to mankind. But there’s one thing they can’t do. They can’t sing a workman’s song!”
9 - Absent Friends
“This track along with ‘Hey Nancy’ marks the two departures on the album from apocalyptic narrative and maybe gives us a chance to reflect on life and death in its more natural nature. Whereas ‘Nancy’ is a song to peer vicariously in wonder through a young child’s eyes, ‘Absent Friends’ is a longing and reminiscence for those loved ones who have gone. Family and nostalgia are at its focus; grief and loss, memories and good times, ghosts of past lives. “Life’s one big weekend” is what my mother used to say.”
10 - Dolly The Sheep
“A Huxleyan, nonsensical bit of madcap fun. Centred around Dolly, our cloned national treasure, we have factories mass producing clones of us secretly at night. There are rumours of Dolly’s espionage, of her time in Guantanamo Bay and her last sighting in a UFO flying over the desert in New Mexico. She gave us so much pleasure, how can we ever forget her?”
11 - Silicon Valley
“A little last bit of vitriol for the runaway cesspit train the internet and social media has become. Slaves to the dopamine hit and the endless self-righteous virtue signalling fact-checkers who seemingly have nothing better to do than scream into the void. A lonely man is trapped inside an algorithmic echo chamber with his opinion rebounded straight back towards him, reaching for the metaverse goggles to alleviate his inner misery and further detach himself from the natural surrounding beauty of the world.”
The Madmen Of Apocalypso is out now on CD, limited-edition vinyl and digital formats on Spring Heeled Records.
Updates following release of The Madmen Of Apocalypso will be found on Paul Molloy’s social media channels as well as the Spring Heeled Records profiles and website. Connect via the following links:
https://twitter.com/paul__molloy
https://www.instagram.com/paulmolloy_music
https://www.facebook.com/PaulMolloyMusicalArtist
www.springheeledrecords.com
https://www.instagram.com/springheeledrecords2024
