The Coral’s Paul Molloy announces his second solo album with doom-baiting, satirical single… Luxury Bunker
Paul Molloy - Luxury Bunker – OUT NOW
Spring Heeled Records
From The Madmen of Apocalypso released Fri 6 September 2024
www.springheeledrecords.com
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Minds warped by the news agenda, endemic paranoia and eccentric isolation feed The Coral’s Paul Molloy’s new concept album, The Madmen Of Apocalypso, a collection of end-of-the-world, 20th Century ragtime-jazz-pop songs, announced with the release of first single, Luxury Bunker – OUT NOW. A Kinksian ode to the extremes and absurdity of mankind, his first new music in four years follows not only recent, critically-acclaimed Coral exploits, but the sell-out success of his own lockdown-released debut album, The Fifth Dandelion.
Set for release on Fri 6 September 2024 on Spring Heeled Records, Molloy’s assemblage of 11 new songs promises wry, weary and wise takes on a world in turmoil and the self-defeating behaviours of the modern human race. Luxury Bunker’s music hall-by-mariachi, sixties pop sensibilities, cut with high-kicking, cabaret-aping breaks, reveals Molloy’s playful handling of otherwise troubling catastrophe cultures found at the fringes of already abnormal society.
Picking up threads left loose by the greatest of British, character-centric songwriters, from Ray Davies to Lennon and McCartney and Viv Stanshall and Neil Innes, the single and many of the album’s distinctive doomsday preoccupations – working with the subtitle ‘A musical satire of the Apocalypse’ – are recounted in vivid, third-person, dramatic and, occasionally, satirical scripting.
He explains: “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.””
While enjoying the resurgent success of The Coral as the band’s most recent albums, Coral Island and Sea Of Mirrors, have proven their credentials as British, idiosyncratic songwriting treasures beyond doubt, Molloy has taken a divergent creative path on The Madmen Of Apocalypso. Throwing back as far as the 1920’s, an era that saw a bruised population roaring back from a pandemic of its own, the multi-instrumentalist songwriter has taken as much from Dixieland jazz as calypso rock and roll and New Orleans ragtime.
The Madmen Of Apocalypso will be released on CD, limited-edition vinyl and digital formats.
Cultivating a city-wide reputation for his musicianship, Molloy’s credits as a songwriter and performer on recordings and in bands with both Liverpool’s up-and-comers and living legends, not limited to Edgar Jones, The Stands, Zutons and a widely-acclaimed tie-up with Ian Skelly as Serpent Power, led to him pick up full-time lead guitar duties in The Coral from the recording of their 2015 album, Distance Inbetween. Around touring, writing and recording duties, he laid-down his own debut album, The Fifth Dandelion, releasing it in August 2020 and rapidly selling out of now sought-after vinyl copies.
Updates on the release of The Madmen Of Apocalypso and single releases 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
