About 15 years ago, I spoke to a relatively unknown neo-psychedelic musician from Western Australia called Kevin Parker. It was shortly before the release of Lonerism, the second album by his one-man-band bedroom project, Tame Impala. Their previous album, Innerspeaker, had been acclaimed in Australia but had made relatively few inroads anywhere else. Parker seemed sanguine about it all. ‘In Perth being a muso is part of a whole lifestyle,’ he told me. ‘It’s a symptom of a directionless existence.’
Lonerism and its follow-up, Currents, shifted the coordinates. Parker’s (clearly very ambitious) dedication to turning an apparent lack of focus into genre-busting psych-rock grooves and sugar-sweet pop ensured that Tame Impala have become a very big deal indeed. The last time he appeared in Glasgow it was at the relatively modest Barrowland Ballroom. Since then, he has written and produced with Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Dua Lipa and – whisper it – Kanye West. Tame Impala had a song on the Barbie soundtrack album. Here is yet another current artist who can sell out arenas and score billions of Spotify streams and yet walk down the street largely unmolested.
By his early teens Parker had developed a system of making music alone which involved ‘playing drums and then layering loads of different things over the top’, which is largely how he still works in the studio. The B-stage for this show was a mock-up of a bedsit-style recording setup, a little Boho enclave from which he performed two songs accompanied only by banks of electronic equipment. It felt like a glimpse behind the curtain to the place where Parker resides – probably more happily – when not doing this.
