'I'VE COME TO REALISE THAT IN ORDER TO FILL THE BOOTS THAT YOU'RE GIVEN YOU HAVE TO GO ALONG WITH THAT SORT OF HYPERBOLE.'
The Sunday Times 20 Jan 2019
THICK balls of smoke billowed into the sky over the Malibu Hills in November. Moments after waking up in his Airbnb rental and makeshift studio, Kevin Parker — frontman for Perth-spawned global rock phenomenon Tame Impala, who turns 33 today — rubbed his eyes and thought, "Are they clouds?"
"I was a bit bleary-eyed and kind of zonked out," the STM Hot List headliner recalls of the dramatic morning that followed a 4am finish toiling away on music for a career-defining 2019. This year, Tame Impala will unveil their hugely
anticipated fourth album and rock 250,000 music lovers over two weekends as the headline act at American mega-festival Coachella.
Back in the rented Malibu pad last year, Parker checked the internet and discovered the unusual clouds were actually smoke from wildfires, and that
authorities had issued an emergency evacuation order.
"That's when I had a wave of panic come over me," Parker says.
Confronted with the usually hypo-thetical question about what he would rescue if his house was on fire, he grabbed his vintage Hofner bass guitar and a laptop full of new sounds, jumped into his car and drove to the beach.
"I didn't know where else to go," Parker says. "At least I knew I could jump in the water. I stood and watched the flames burning the hillside for an hour."
Another, hour later, fire had con-sumed the house, leaving just the chimney, ash and debris. About $40,000 worth of second-hand recording gear was lost, but Parker was more concerned about coyotes and other fauna than his equipment.
"I usually sleep a bit later," he masses, "so it's quite lucky that I woke up when I did."
Chatting in the South Fremantle home he's converted into a studio, the eight-time ARIA Award-winner cuts a relaxed figure, reclining on a couch in a white T-shirt, black jeans and thongs, and sipping a beer.
Three of those eight pointy ARIA trophies sit on the mantelpiece to his right, while to his left is a bed on which sits a big stuffed toy tiger he bought at a truck stop during one of Tame Impala's epic trawls across the US. The musical alchemist bought another house down the road to live in with girlfriend, Sophie Lawrence, before knocking down walls for his sonic laboratory, where he makes music for to or more hours a day when he's in town.
"As soon as it begins to feel like work, that's when I go home. Or go to sleep," he says. "The idea is for it to never feel like work."
Parker has his work cut out for him in 2019.
Not only is he making the follow-up to Tame Impala's chart-topping 2015 release Currents, which won their second ARIA for album of the year, but in April the band will stage the biggest performance of their 12 year career at Coachella.
Tame Impala is only the second Australian act to land top billing at America's biggest music festival, after AC/DC headlined in 2015, with the Perth lads a line below on the posters.
Parker and his touring buddies will close the event in front of 125,000 fasts on the second of three nights on both weekends — the same slot that hosted an incredible performance from Beyonce last year. Tame Impala were elevated to top spot in December after Justin Timberlake dropped out because of bruised vocal cords.
But if he's feeling the heat, the poker-faced Parker is remaining remarkably cool.
When festival organisers announced Tame Impala as surprise headliners alongside US pop superstars Ariana Grande and Childish Gambino earlier this month, Parker forgot to tell bandmates Cam Avery, Dominic Simper and Julien Barbagallo, who all live overseas. (Perth-based Jay Watson completes the live line-up.)
"They would've woken up, seen the poster and thought that it was a joke," laughs Parker, who quickly transmitted a message: "Hey guys, by the way, it's real!"
"If they read this interview, they'll know I forgot. We're not much of a celebratory gang."
That said, the low-key rock star knows Tame Impala will have to up the ante for Coachella.
He hints they may team with cre-ative director Willo Perron, who has produced concerts for Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Jay-Z and Florence + the Machine, and worked with Tame Impala for their Panorama Music Festival performance in New York two years ago.
I've held back before because we've always tried to be under-stated, (but this is) kind of a licence to not be that anymore," Parker says. "If that means having 100 lasers instead of six, so be it. With-out giving too much away, I think that's a given."
Tame Impala also headline Primavera Sound, the highly regarded festival held in Barcelona, in late May and early June. "Oh, yeah," Parker says of it, as though he's been re-minded to buy milk on the way home.
The Primavera website describes Parker as an "almost legendary, messianic figure and creative soul". While he might have been embarrassed when 2010 debut Innerspeaker and 2012 follow-up Lonerism earned high praise for its Cream and Led Zeppelin-inspired Elephant, Apocalypse Dreams and APRA Song of the Year winner Feels Like We Only Go Backwards, today Parker almost embraces the excessive embroidery.
"I've come to realise that in order to fill the boots that you're given, you have to go along with that sort of hyperbole," he says, choosing his words carefully. "It takes more energy to react to those kinds of things, people saying you're legendary or whatever. Which is not to say I am buying into my own myth, but there are people who are far less successful than me who I think are gods. Some people want to think that I am great in some way — that's great, fine, whatever — I'm not going to rain on your parade."
The Coachella headline slot further feeds the mythology surrounding arguably WA's greatest musical ex-port since Bon Scott.
Collaborations with hit-maker Mark Ronson, Texan rapper Travis Scott and Lady Gaga also add to the aura around the John XXIII College grad-uate. Parker admits having a WTF moment while filming the video for Lady Gaga's 2016 hit Perfect Illusion, which he wrote with Ronson and the Born This Way singer.
Midway through the clip, Gaga put the Perth muso in a headlock (check it out on YouTube 2:36, folks).
"That was excruciating, she was pulling my hair so hard I thought it was going to rip out," Parker laugns. "She gave me no warning it was going to happen ... she was not remorseful."
Despite having such famous friends, Parker hardly seems like a messiah, almost legendary or otherwise, especially cracking another stubby in his slightly run-down South Freo studio with an abandoned dinghy out the back.
"Freo's my home, man," he says. "There's no place like it. "Actually, I don't know if I should be saying this, I just bought a house in LA, so I'm going to be spending some time there. And the road is my other home."
While he's a studio hound, this fan of the Beatles, Beach Boys and Supertramp is no recluse. In recent weeks, he's partied at Highgate bar Si Paradiso and hung out in the VIP area at the Falls Festival in Fremantle.
And he loves hitting the beach to keep the inspiration flowing.
A photograph of tourists frolicking at the Italian seaside sits above his computer at home.
"I just get lost in it," says Parker, who avoids listening to music while trying to create his own. "That's the sort of thing that makes music play in my head. Anything that flicks on Tame Impala radio in my head is inspiring to me."
He insists playing Coachella has not put a deadline on the fourth Tame Impala album.
"I like to think that the album is its own thing," Parker says. "I wouldn't want in 20 years to be listening to an album I made now and think that I finished it for any dead-line or any particular reason. It was finished because it was finished."
Four years ago British music maga-zine NME described Currents as "astronomically anticipated", so it's fair to say there are enormous expectations for whatever comes next.
"I prefer to see it as a wave I have to surf," Parker says. "I don't surf, so body surf. I don't like to see it as a wall or pressure, you know, it's just something that is there and it's up to me to work with it.
"Anticipation is good ... I want to be the kind of artist that feels em-powered by people waiting to hear what I've got," he says, before adding with a laugh: "This is the Gaga in me speaking."
by Simon Collins via PerthNow
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