It’s a few days before Glastonbury, and Kevin Parker – the 29-year-old Australian musical polymath behind Tame Impala – is in west London rehearsing for his appearance at the festival with Mark Ronson. Somewhat extravagantly, Ronson has hired out the entirety of the Hammersmith Apollo for the week as a practice room. Presumably he can afford it, though. “Have you ever heard of a little song called Uptown Funk?” jokes Parker.
While there have been odder musical pairings, at first glance it seems incongruous that Parker, a long-haired rocker who has the permanent air of a man wearing sandals, is working with a superproducer more associated with the clean-cut likes of Bruno Mars. It’s just one illustration of how far Parker’s home-produced records have taken him. “The scale that things happen on with Mark is about five levels above how we do it with Tame Impala,” says Parker.
For much of the last five years, Parker has been acclimatising to the shifts in scale that success brings. His acclaimed 2010 debut, Innerspeaker, ushered in a new wave of young psych rock bands such as Pond, Toy and Hookworms, and turned a whole new generation of fans on to the transcendental power of scuzzy, droning guitars. The follow-up, 2012’s Lonerism, gave Parker platinum album sales, award wins and a Grammy nomination. Psych obsessives the world over suddenly had a new anthem in Elephant, three-and-a-half minutes of throbbing riffs that brought joy to the hearts of Floyd and Zeppelin fans alike. Before long, Kendrick Lamar was rapping over a remix of his single Feels Like We Only Go Backwards and Parker was collaborating with his heroes the Flaming Lips.
When we sit down for a drink at a hotel near the Apollo, Parker is so laidback he’s in danger of falling off his chair. This might seem appropriate for a practitioner of woozy music, but less so for a guy noted for his obsessive perfectionism. Maybe it’s the calm before the storm. Lonerism earned Parker legions of new fans, from Ronson to the army of beards who’ll be wigging out when Tame Impala headline End Of The Road festival in September, but he’s about to ask them to follow him in an entirely new direction. His latest album, Currents, ditches the heavy wall of psych and Tomorrow Never Knows-style loops, and instead we get a collection of Michael Jackson-influenced disco. Parker denies his decision had anything to do with the genre’s Get Lucky-fuelled resurgence, or even his collaboration with Ronson. In his unflappably mellow manner, he puts it down to a more personal Damascene moment.
“I was in LA a few years ago and for some reason we’d taken mushrooms, it must have been the end of our tour,” he recalls. “I was coked up as well, and a friend was driving us around LA in this old sedan. He was playing the Bee Gees and it had the most profound emotional effect. I’m getting butterflies just thinking about it. I was listening to Staying Alive, a song I’ve heard all my life. At that moment it had this really emotive, melancholy feel to it. The beat felt overwhelmingly strong and, at that moment, it sounded pretty psychedelic. It moved me, and that’s what I always want out of psych music. I want it to transport me.”
You might think from that story, or indeed from listening to his records, that Parker spends the entire recording process tripping his nut off, locked in a shamanic embrace with his muse. However, while he regards people choosing to listen to Tame Impala under the influence as the highest compliment, he doesn’t take drugs to make music for people to take drugs to. “I’d be disappointed if I was sat there with no ideas and thought: ‘Hey, maybe if I get stoned I’ll have some ideas,’” he says. “I’d feel quite defeated. At the same time, sometimes if I’m smoking a spliff halfway through a recording session it makes things sound more potent. When I had the idea for some of my best songs I was stone-cold sober. Some of my best songs I thought of stoned and recorded stoned. There’s no correlation.”
While Innerspeaker and Lonerism lend themselves to contemplative stoner sessions, new songs such as The Moment and Disciples are more attuned to the dancefloor. Parker likes to picture Currents being played at sunrise at a Goan beach rave, or anywhere else where the music itself – and not a live band – is the audience’s focal point. Just as he blazed a trail by making psych cool again when it seemed passé, he’s confident that Tame Impala’s fans will follow him barefoot on to the sand.
Parker knew which musical direction he wanted to follow, but the lyrical content was more difficult. Parker had recently gone through a breakup with the French singer Melody Prochet of the group Melody’s Echo Chamber. His next album, he realised, would be the age-old tale of someone changing and drifting away from a relationship. Then he decided it would also be told from the perspective of the person doing the changing.
So on Currents we get songs with titles such as Let It Happen and Yes I’m Changing. Eventually is perhaps the fullest expression of the concept, though: a breakup song told from the side of the person who wants out. “I find there’s a lot of poetry, art and songs singing about the plight of someone with someone changing in front of them,” explains Parker. “It excited me to tell the story from the other side. Trying to explain that it’s not a bad thing, its just natural. Eventually is a song about someone who knows they’re about to damage someone. They’re not going to be the one experiencing the pain that’s dealt. They’re the one dealing it. Arguably, it’s just as emotionally crippling knowing that you’re gonna do that. It’s just as heavy. It’s just as torturous.”
While Parker insists the album is “completely” autobiographical, he says it’s not entirely fuelled by his most recent breakup. “It’s not necessarily about that one situation,” he says. “The inspiration to write a song comes to me when something has happened to me more than once. If it’s happened to me more than once, it’s probably happened to other people.”
It was the breakup with Prochet, however, that prompted Parker to return home to Perth from living in Paris. There, he created his “fantasy studio”, a place where he’s able to find the splendid isolation he needs to record. “It’s literally just me in a room,” he says. “I love to have everything within reach, so that it starts resembling a cockpit. I love to be able to put my hands on a keyboard, to have a guitar and a bass within reach, as well as all the effects. Then I just piece it together.”
Parker has gained his reputation as a perfectionist for good reason, and every time he makes an album there comes a point when his relationship with the record goes from idle flirtation to life-consuming obsession. “When I’ve got to finish an album in the next six months, then it’s all day, every day,” he says. “I wake up, listen to what I did the night before, then fiddle. At some point, life outside the studio fades into the distance. That’s how I know that I’m into it. If I was to stay level-headed and sane the whole time I’d probably be a bit disappointed because it would mean that I didn’t give my all; that the music wasn’t powerful enough to consume me.”
So now, with the record ostensibly finished, is he happy with it? “No!” he laughs. “There’s still things I’d change. I just have to set myself a deadline. I’ve never been 100% happy with anything at the time of doing it. You stop hearing things that people are going to hear the first time they hear it. You become deaf to the potency of a melody or a chord change and you’re just listening to how loud the hi-hat is.”
Listening to Parker talk about the struggle to capture the pristine music in his head recalls Iris Murdoch’s observation that every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. He laughs when I tell him. “That’s powerful,” he says. “I know exactly what that means.”
There must be personal cost to all this obsessiveness: relationships sacrificed, old friends left behind? “There is,” he admits, “but that’s the cost of being an artist. You sacrifice your normal life. You sacrifice that part of you to make better art. Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.”
As he rallies those emotions and melodies in pursuit of the perfect sound, Parker is unconcerned about losing any hardcore fans who might have preferred him to just churn out another Lonerism.
“I don’t like the idea that I’m a one-trick pony, even if I am!” he says. “No matter what else I do, I have to make sure that Elephant isn’t Tame Impala’s biggest song anywhere”.
Currents is out on 17 Jul on Fiction; Tame Impala play the End Of The Road festival, Blandford, 5 Sep
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