Tame Impala vows his Australian tour will be the best yet
Anxiety and personal pain have become the prime motivating forces for Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker after his rocket ride to stardom in the pop world.
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Kevin Parker isn’t the one having panic attacks about Tame Impala’s impending global tour in support of his long-awaited fourth album The Slow Rush.
“Oh, there are panic attacks happening over budgets, don’t worry about that. It’s my job to make the panic attacks happen. To cause them,” he says, laughing.
As much as balancing the artist’s vision for a show – giant video screens, lasers, pyros, all of the bells and whistles – with the budget may be a source of anxiety for everyone around them, it’s symbolic of just how big Tame Impala has become in the past five years.
The “band” is really Parker’s creative alter ego; he writes, records and produces everything himself in home studios in Fremantle and Los Angeles. Tame Impala becomes a group when he tours, recalling his best mates to assemble for their live duties.
Courtesy of the ARIA award-winning Currents album, Parker became someone everyone wanted to work with for his unique take on dreamy yet danceable psychedelic pop.
His hitmaking friend Mark Ronson tapped him to work on his Uptown Special album and Rihanna recorded his song New Person, Same Old Mistakes for her Anti record.
Big fan Travis Scott enlisted Parker to co-write and produce Skeletons on his chart-topping 2018 album, Astroworld and his credit features on Lady Gaga’s Perfect Illusion. She also rocks out with Parker on drums in the song’s video.
Even as he worked with other artists over those years, Tame Impala’s stocks continued to rise; the 2015 disco funk single The Less I Know The Better brought the mainstream to him and became their biggest global hit with almost half a billion streams on Spotify alone.
The band was booked to headline night two at last year’s Coachella festival, even without a new album to push.
He was able to share two songs, Patience – which isn’t on the Slow Rush – and Borderline, tasters of the new Tame Impala music he had been cooking over the previous 18 months.
Writing the new album was interrupted in late 2018 when the apartment he was renting in Malibu was destroyed by the bushfires which swept through California.
He managed to grab his beloved vintage Hofner bass and laptop, which held his works in progress before evacuating but lost about $30,000 worth of instruments when they building was destroyed.
Parker was in Sydney as the city was choked by the acrid smoke blanket generated by this summer’s bushfire crisis and admits his anxiety levels spiked.
“It was kind of uncanny … I briefly felt like it was following me around but it didn’t take me long to realise it is literally following everyone around because it’s literally everywhere in the world,” he says.
“Also, I didn’t lose that much stuff compared to everyone else in these fires, people who have lost lives and houses and pets and irreplaceable things. Compared to that, I lost nothing, I lost a bit of musical equipment … but yeah it was crazy.”
The Malibu apartment, and his other home studios, serve as creative cocoons where he can experiment without distraction or judgment.
Parker likes to have “one man parties” to fuel the songwriting juices and that modus operandi hasn’t changed much over the years since he released the 2010 debut record Innerspeaker, through the psychedelic twists of 2012’s Lonerism or the danceable pop of Currents.
“It’s something I’ve more and more resigned myself to being a creative time for me. It’s an undeniable thing for me to do that allows me to get lost in the music, as cheesy as that sounds and just get away from everything that I’m thinking about, getting away from the overthinking of it,” he says.
“I’ll go every day for a week sometimes and then not again for a month. I just drink gin and red wine and smoke spliffs and usually about 9pm is the (witching hour). Beyond that point is when the quality tends to deteriorate. It’s just like being at any party.”
His works in progress were shared with wife Sophie Lawrence – the pair married a year ago at a winery in Western Australia – preferring her fresh ears to the subjective ones of his legion of musician friends.
“She’s kind of my litmus test for whether something is a good idea or not,” he says.
“All my friends who I play music with, I trust their opinions almost more than anything.
“But because they are musicians, sometimes their opinions will be clouded by that. They’ll hear something that reminds them of some s--- ‘80s song too much for them to say that they like it.”
Tame Impala acolytes have been examining the Slow Rush songs already for revelations, some expecting Parker to reveal the meaning of life in the swirls of his dreampop landscape.
Cynics searching for anti-fame sermons in the wake of his embrace by some of the biggest pop stars in the world can give up; Parker hates to write about his “music career”.
Instead, there is the deeply personal and emotional sonic love letter to his late father, Posthumous Forgiveness and Breathe Deeper, a song about the intensity of his first experience of ecstasy back when he was about 20. It Might Be Time is also about when the party stops.
“Sometimes I am writing from the perspective where it feels like I am being voyeuristic. But then there’s a song like Posthumous Forgiveness which is deeply personal and since I started releasing music, I’ve almost got addicted to that feeling of being personal,” he says.
“It is terrifying, and I used to bury all my lyrics in metaphors … but as soon as I started (getting personal) it was so cathartic.
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“If anything, the song about my father was easy because it was so personal, because I had so much stuff, so many words and feelings that fell out of me.
“And that was only as difficult as having a big cry is, you know. Crying is easy if you’re not worried who you are crying in front of.”
As for his plans for Tame Impala’s biggest ever arena tour of Australia in April, Parker is keeping mum on whether it will feature more confetti guns than Beyonce’s Homecoming show or the spaceship lighting ring which were the talk of Coachella.
“I’m not going to say anything … which is not a yes or no. We are working now to get it to be the best thing we possibly can and easily the best show we have put on in Australia before and whether or not that involves the ring, ahem, you know, I am going to withhold that,” he says.
“I hate for people to know what to expect.”
The Slow Rush is out now. Tame Impala perform at Brisbane’s Entertainment Centre on April 18, Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena on April 20, Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena on April 23, Adelaide’s Entertainment Centre Arena on April 24 and 25 and Perth’s RAC Arena on April 28.