THE CORAL and CILLIAN MURPHY are 'Oceans Apart'
Stardust falls on The Coral’s flickering, imagined Italian Western soundtrack as Cillian Murphy joins the band for…
OCEANS APART
The result of off-the-cuff remarks in the studio, happenstance and the contact book of the album’s co-producer, Sean O’Hagan, Murphy agreed to narrate spoken word verses as Ocean’s Apart’s slow-building, swirling, string-laden album finale comes to a close, using words written by the band’s keyboard player, frequent songwriter and poet, Nick Power.
With the band describing the track as ‘the bohemian rhapsody Queen would’ve written if, instead of touring the world, they stayed in watching cinecittà studios films and listening to Gene Clark’, the song’s drama is borne of studio sessions riven with playful levity and unending possibility.
Singer and songwriter, James Skelly adds: “Once everybody had put their parts on the track. Sean suggested we have some dialogue over the outro and said he’d done the soundtrack to Cillian Murphy’s first film, so he had a contact. A few weeks later I got an email from Cillian saying he was a fan and would be up for helping us.
“We discussed the character and how I saw it as a once great star like Buster Keaton or Bella Lagosi on the set of a low-budget B movie, looking back thinking: ‘How did I get here?’ I sent him what Nick had written and then left it up to him to do his thing and when we put what he sent us over the music it fitted perfectly.”