Tame Impala
Kevin Murphy tells us the story of the band’s debut, InnerSpeaker.
In 2010, Tame Impala released an album that would change the course of modern psychedelic prog. InnerSpeaker took Kevin Parker on a journey from western Australia’s underground clubs to international arenas and led to him becoming a sought-after music producer. Prog takes the reluctant rock star on a trip down memory lane to celebrate the LP’s 10th anniversary reissue.
Even before he became famous, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker had no time for rock’n’roll showboating. Whipping audiences up into a frenzy? That was someone else’s job. “The bands that rose to the top were always the crowd-pleasers,” says Parker of the scene in his hometown of Perth when he was starting out in the mid-00s. “I always thought that was so lame. For us, the more zonked out the crowd were, the more they were into it.”
Shaky phone camera footage on YouTube backs this up. A short clip filmed at a small Australian festival in September 2008 sees the then-three piece playing on some backwater stage to a sparse crowd, most of whom are sprawled in the sun. Not that Parker cares – he’s got his head down, noodling away. The audience could be doing naked cartwheels for all the attention he’s paying them.
That stubborn refusal to please other people has never left Parker. When he released the first Tame Impala album, 2010’s InnerSpeaker, what psych rock scene there was existed largely underground – which is, by rights, where this cultish Australian band whose warm-bath psychedelic pop wreathed in spliff smoke should have remained. Yet the album launched the man who made it on a journey that has seen him become a bona fide pop star and the collaborator of choice for everyone from Kanye West to Lady Gaga.
A new deluxe reissue of InnerSpeaker is a reminder of just how far Parker has travelled,
but how little distance he’s really come. The rippling, disco funk of Tame Impala’s 2020 album The Slow Rush may sound a world away from InnerSpeaker, but both draw on the same spirit of adventurousness and refusal to bow to exterior influences. Kevin Parker’s peers have changed, but Parker himself hasn’t.
When he conceived Tame Impala as a oneman project in 2007, those peers were his fellow members of Perth’s psych scene – though ‘scene’ is stretching it. “There were maybe 10 people, and six of us lived together,” he says with a laugh, speaking via Zoom from Australia’s west coast.
For a music obsessive like Parker, living in a shared house with other music obsessives was the perfect setup. They would listen to psychedelia, prog and “weird cosmic electronic music”, then try to come up with their own versions of it all.
“The more ambitious the chords were, the weirder the structure, the more mind-blowing it was to us,” says Parker. “Like, “There’s this part, then it goes into this part, then there’s a drum break, then there’s this 7/8 section? Wow…’ It was prog in the classic sense.”
Theirs was a self-contained universe, one where everyone and everything merged into a big, amorphous musical collective. A Rock Family Trees-style illustration of the Perth scene would look more like a small tangled bush, with branches knotting together and looping back in on themselves. “We had about seven bands and side-projects and stuff going on,” says Parker, “and we were all writing songs for all these different things.”
Some of the configurations were identifiable as bands, but from the start Parker envisioned Tame Impala as his thing and his alone. Creative autonomy gave him the freedom to experiment with sounds, styles and structures without the hassle of compromise. Some of the music he was writing was progressive, some of it was more pop, but it was all heading in broadly the same direction. “It was more than just the kind of stoner rock we were listening to at the time,” he says.
For a while, Parker’s ideas outstripped his recording abilities. He had a digital 8-track, with guitar, pedals and microphone plugged straight into it. Whenever he hit on something,
“Knowing now just how little of a clue I had with a lot of what I was doing makes me realise that maybe I have come a long way after all.”
he would just play and record – a process that was as scrappy as it sounds.
“I had to basically write as much of the song as I could and play it out over a metronome, then build it up with different guitars. It was good because it made me think ahead.”
Starting songs was never a problem, he says, but finishing them was. What he had on his side was a disregard for the rules and conventions of traditional songwriting, something that sprang from the music he loved. “With a pop song, you’ve got all kinds of constraints, which is kind of the challenge of it,” he says. “But with the kind of music I listened to, the palette was wide open.”
He was ambitious, too, even if he wasn’t sure exactly where he wanted that ambition to take him. “I couldn’t pinpoint what I wanted, but I wanted it to be a career,” he says. Not that Parker was actively chasing success. Early gigs – featuring drummer Jay Watson and bassist Dom Simper – were played purely on Tame Impala’s terms, irrespective of whether crowds were zonked out or not. “We’d do, like, four songs in 45 minutes,” says Parker.
A record deal with hip Australian major label subsidiary Modular in 2008 did little to curb their musical excesses. “After we got signed, we played a showcase for the label, and we played three songs in 30 minutes,” says Parker. “They said, ‘That’s not gonna fly, guys.’ That made us dig our heels in further.”
This obstinacy was justified by the buzz that sprang up around Tame Impala’s selftitled second EP – their first for Modular – released in October 2008 and featuring a trio of tracks that Parker had recorded at different points over the past couple of years. It didn’t take long for word of these psych rock flagbearers to spread overseas. In March 2009, Tame Impala arrived in the UK to play a short tour. Their first gig was at Manchester’s Deaf Institute, supporting long-forgotten indie rockers The Invisible. The following night they headlined their own show at north London pub The Lexington, where comedian and psych aficionado Noel Fielding turned up to watch them.
“We’d spent the last 18 months stoned on the couch at home watching The Mighty Boosh,” says Parker. “And then he came to our show. That was truly out of this world. I remember getting back to our hotel, just sitting on the balcony and smoking a cigarette in the middle of the night after everyone had gone to bed, trying to process it.” The conclusion he drew? There was no going back.
Parker began work on Tame Impala’s debut album a couple of months later. There was talk of it being a double album – partly a reaction to the nagging paranoia that his friends might view signing to a major label as selling out.
“It was just one of our stoned, mischievous ideas: ‘Fuck it, let’s do a double! Having a double album as a debut is definitely not selling out!’ It seemed a lot more feasible in our heads than it would have ended up being on paper.”
“There are a lot more prog moments on The Slow Rush than on Lonerism and certainly on Currents.”
InnerSpeaker ended up being a single album, although shrinkage wasn’t the only thing that changed in the run-up. Parker had initially planned to record as a three-piece, with
Simper and Watson. “But it didn’t seem right.” he says. “We accepted that it should be what it had been up to that point, which was a solo recording. We were at peace with it by then.”
Parker recorded the album in the summer of 2009 at Wave House, a rented wooden property on the shores of the Indian Ocean. The roof leaked when it rained and the whole place rattled when the wind blew, but to Parker it was a palace. “One of the beautiful things about making music in that house was that anything you did sounded majestic because of the surroundings.”
The finished album was as expansive as the views from Wave House’s floor-to-ceiling oceanfront windows, yet as insular as a mushroom trip. InnerSpeaker drew on
Parker’s love of psych and prog, but married it to the big pop melodies he’d loved ever since he heard his dad’s Beatles, Beach Boys and Supertramp albums as a kid. His own stamp came with the shape-shifting percussive barrage that propelled every track. “I’m obsessed with drum sounds,” he says.
“I wanted to make almost electronic-sounding beats, except on real drums.”
If there’s one song that unlocked what was going on in his head at that point, it’s Solitude Is Bliss.‘There’s a party in my head and no one is invited,’ sings Parker over what’s effectively an Antipodean take on krautrock. “That was one of the lyrics that my friends thought was the cheesiest,” he says. “We’d scoff at each other’s lyrics sometimes, and that was very much one of the ones everyone scoffed at.”
Solitude Is Bliss was the first single from
InnerSpeaker, released in April 2010. The album followed six weeks later. Parker was confident with what he had. “I wasn’t arrogant, but I was aware that I had a kind of winning combination of things, in terms of the styles I landed on.”
InnerSpeaker charted at No.4 in Australia, but not everyone in the media was impressed. “I remember a lot of bad reviews,” he says. “One review said, ‘Possibly Australia’s most uninspired band.’ We were used to getting reviews that said we were lost up our own arseholes, so that shit didn’t affect us at all.”
The reaction overseas was better. Thanks to high-profile celebrity fans such as Fielding and Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher, Tame Impala’s music began to bleed beyond the boundaries of the psych scene. They toured the US and appeared ever higher on European festival bills. By the time they returned to the UK in 2011, they were headlining London’s Roundhouse. Yet the growing attention was having an adverse effect on the man at the centre of it all.
“I kind of flipped out after InnerSpeaker came out,” he says. “It felt like the whole thing was kind of taken out of my hands, and that made me really frustrated. I was afraid for the spirit of it all.”
He told the people around him that he was done with the circus. “I basically said, ‘I’m gonna make another album but I’m not gonna tour, fuck you guys.’ It took me a while to go back home and chill out.”
By the time he returned with 2012’s Lonerism, this weird project he’d cooked up in a bedroom in Perth had inadvertently helped instigate a full-blown psych revival. For Parker, the ‘p’ word had become unwanted baggage. “‘Psych’ was something I cringed at, because it was thrown around so much with my music,” he says. “Any time anyone called my music psych rock, I wanted to prove I wasn’t that.”
Things have changed. He’s not just happier with the term these days, he says, but he feels more connected than ever to his roots. “The Slow Rush reminds me a lot more of that kind of free-flowing music that Innerspeaker has. A song like [The Slow Rush opener] One More Year isn’t really pop – structurally it’s a lot more open-ended. There are a lot more prog moments on The Slow Rush than on Lonerism and certainly on [2015’s] Currents.”
That’s not to say he’s planning on revisiting the sound of InnerSpeaker. “There are fans who think they want an InnerSpeaker 2.0, but they really don’t. They wouldn’t love it as much as they did the original, even if it was better.”
InnerSpeaker isn’t necessarily the definitive Tame Impala album because Parker has redefined himself on each of their four records. But it is the wellspring from which everything that followed came, no matter how smooth or polished things became. It’s the sound of a musician doing things his own way, stubborn and single-minded from the start.
“The strength of the album is the fact that it was just one person putting it all together in a weird and wonderful way - just throwing all these things together, not really know how to execute it,” says Parker. “Knowing now just how little of a clue I had with a lot of what
I was doing makes me realise that maybe
I have come a long way after all.”
InnerSpeaker (10th Anniversary Edition) is out now via Fiction. See www.official.tameimpala.com for more information.