Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show is the show that brings you sounds from the other side all through the night. We’ll be playing murder ballads and death-ditties, love songs and eulogies, songs about drifters, grifters, hobos and killers…

If Coral Island was a box-office hit in 2022, then Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show is it’s low-budget little brother, written in a year and stitched together in less- think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ll or Police Academy: Mission To Moscow but without the plane fare to Russia. This is a sequel to rival the most shameless of cash-ins.

It features a ramshackle cast: along with the usual suspects, Coral Islandcompère (and Skelly Granddad) The Great Moriarty makes a return, alongside actor and friend-of-the-band John Simm, who recites wanderlust eulogy Drifter’s Prayer. Glaswegian singer Rianne Downey is involved in a murderous duet. An unnamed pedal-steel player from the back of beyond plays a funeral score over Hotel.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an act of self-sabotage or half-arsed in any way; more a deliberate attempt to make an art form out of the forgotten follow-up. Who else but The Coral are going to fill this important cultural sinkhole?

Framed inside a midnight radio show beaming out from a Michelin blimp that hovers somewhere past the piers of Coral Island, Holy Joe… is a love letter to the tradition of the death disc and murder ballad, from Stack-o-Lee to Skeleton Key, and everything in between.

Stay up late. Tune in. If you do, who knows? You might end up loving it more than the original.