A buoyant yet bittersweet ode to nostalgia, Australian alternative rock icons Eskimo Joe returned in March armed with ‘The First Time’; the band’s first new music since 2021’s 99 Ways. Appearing at the hugely popular Lookout Festival alongside Live and Incubus before embarking on their National Acoustic Theatre Tour which started in April, ‘The First Time’ feels familiar yet fresh, with Eskimo Joe capturing the essence of their stadium rock-ready triumph, 2008’s ‘Black Fingernails, Red Wine’, alongside some sharp 2024 vigour.
We caught up with Kav Temperley to talk song writing, festivals and giving back to the local scene, something extremely close to Kav’s heart, especially with Eskimo Joe’s Fremantle roots near & dear to him and the band…
Sean: Hey Kav, hope you’re keeping well.
Kav: Yes, great thanks.
Sean: Thanks so much for your time. I’ve had the pleasure of chatting to Stu twice but this our first one. You are looking comfortable sat amongst a whole host of instruments!
Kav: No problems at all. As you can see there is a lot of percussion stuff then just drums [laughs]. Drums fill up the most amount of space and who would actually want to be a drummer! In a band because you’d just be carrying drums with you everywhere all the time [laughs].
Sean: Well, a huge congratulations on the new single ‘The First Time’. I feel a bit sad that we are hitting Autumn & Winter but the summer feel to this one really picks me back up again.
Kav: Well, we wrote it at kind of during the summer season. We’d just been out on the road and done a bunch of these shows at this festival called Good Things and it was amazing. We were lucky enough to be one of those bands who got to play the Big Day Out tour and stuff back in the day when it was this behemoth festival where you’d play in front of huge crowds. You’d get up there on the main stage and be 30,000 deep every single time and that was just in front of your stage so it was kind of that vibe and there was a lot of people and we just relished in that moment. We were like, “This is great!” It’s so good to be on one of these stages in front of these big amounts of people people again and it was summer and then we got into this little studio that you see behind me after that experience and we were like, well what kind of song do we want to write and we just kind of bottled that feeling and put it into a tune and it picked up that summer feel from there.
Sean: You touched on festivals then and we have seen so many dropping by the wayside but of course Lookout Festival has seemed to be an absolutely rip-roaring success and your home hometown of Perth had the honour of the final show of the tour. What was that like.
Kav: Yeah, it’s been great. Yes we could kind of wax lyrical for a long point in time about why these shows aren’t working and are why that’s not working and everyone will have their learned opinion. We all know we’re still coming out of a period where no one was going to shows you know, so these big festivals not getting the numbers that they used to get is you’ve got to remember the demographic of people who’ve been in their bedrooms for three years so it’s a really difficult sell. Whereas these festivals that say we’re doing, you know they’re almost nostalgia festivals. They’re people who all bought these albums when you could still buy CDs and they probably still got their CD that they listened to so they’re very invested in that way and they also travel. Some of those big festivals, you’ve got to buy the ticket, the hotel room and all those things. These big nostalgia festivals that we’ve been doing are kind of traveling into people’s world so it makes it a bit more accessible as well I think. And there were full crowds every show and obviously we’ve been playing a brand new song, which is an absolute pleasure when you’ve got twenty odd years of music and you’ve got twenty songs behind you, it’s pretty refreshing to go out and play a brand new song.
Sean: So are there plans to release anything more this year? The last time I spoke to Stu was when you guys released ’99 Ways’ back in 2021. I know you all seem to have lots always going on so is it just a logistical thing, trying to get you all together to write?
Kav: Yeah, look we you know, when we were making records and doing that two-year cycle of writing an album, recording an album, touring an album we always took it very very seriously, like this was our job. I had a studio very similar to this one and we would go in there at the crack of noon and then chip away five days a week and by the end of that time we’d have an album and so we worked really really hard on everything that we did. We don’t really know how to not do that, because that’s just how we approach it – we will go in and do it in there. We don’t just rock up and jam and that’s the song. We think about the songs for long periods of time and then the tracking goes on and on and so I think because we’ve got all these other things going on in our lives and we still love making music together, we’re probably lucky if we get to squeeze out two songs in a year and ‘Say Something’ was the first song that we had done after being on sabbatical, I guess you could call it and we managed to get another one out ’99 Ways’ but this song feels like, and I hate to say it you know, speaking in the third person but it feels like a return to form but I feel like with ‘Say Something’ and ’99 Ways’, we weren’t playing shows. We were just getting into the jam room and having a jam and this song feels like because we’ve been playing it, we like I mentioned and we played all these shows, we feel more like Eskimo Joe again.
As far as getting in to do a whole record, I just don’t know how we’d be able to pull that off with all of the other things we do in our world. I mean I produce other bands, I also do solo stuff and it’s the same with Joel who does production as well. And we love doing that stuff and it makes us be able to come back to Eskimo Joe and really enjoy Eskimo Joe as a band. We’re not trying to make it into anything that it’s not. We get to do that in our other worlds, you know. If Joe wants to write pop songs he can do that with other people and if I want to do my crazy esoteric solo records, I can do that over here and then we get to come back together and make Eskimo Joe music and it feels really good. So we’re definitely going to put… well I shouldn’t say definitely, we would like to put out another song before the year’s out… that’s my exclusive to you [laughs]. Me and Joel started working on a new song the other week. Like I said, we take a long time to make sure that thing come together so I really hope that we managed to get that recorded and put out before the year is out. It feels like this most recent song was received so well that it just feels right to put out another song.
Sean: You mentioned some of the things you are doing outside of Eskimo Joe, and one thing I love is that you are kind of giving back by supporting local artists. I’m a good friend of Haylee Robins and I know she has worked and written with you.
Kav: It’s been great to work with her.
Sean: It’s reassuring to see a photo pop up with someone like Haylee and yourself and see music come from that, especially with the fabulous CV you have behind you, and there you are supporting others.
Kav: Music’s always existed in Perth and lots of people have been making music for a long time but when we were coming up, there certainly wasn’t a scene in that sense you know. You didn’t have a whole lot of bands who had the Perth sound or whatever
and we found that as we were touring up and down the east coast, when we put out our first EP which had this song ‘Sweater’ on it and that got picked up on Triple J and so we just started touring and every time we would get up onto stage we would say, “Hello we are Eskimo Joe from Fremantle, Western Australia” and everyone would cheer and so it felt good and felt like there was a power in that and so after we’d completed two 10-week in a row tours of duty, we came back to Perth, and it was just decided that we were
going to be a Perth band. We were going to be a band from Fremantle, and that was going to be who we were, and we were going to draw power from that, and we started recording and demoing, and we’d meet up with other bands who did that, but it wasn’t until we made an album called ‘A Song is a City’ that energy that we’ve been putting into being from Fremantle really started to bear fruit. So we had a jam room, much like the one you see behind us, and, all these bands were coming and hanging out and doing demos in our room, and so you saw bands like Little Birdie and End of Fashion and the Sleepy Jackson and Gyroscope, and all these bands kind of emerge out of this jam room, and for the first time you saw record labels traveling to Perth to sign bands, and that was unheard of at the time, so that’s kind of like, you know, carried on to what we do now. We’re still a band from Perth, I live and work in Fremantle. I love recording with people like Haylee who ring me up and say, “Hey, do you want to record a song?” And I always say, “Well, you know, you sure you know what that means? Because I will work you really hard” and then if they’re still smiling by the end of it, then it’s usually good. We’ve worked with some amazing producers over the years, we’ve made big budget albums, and I love bringing all that knowledge, you know, into my local scene, because that’s just going to feed out into it, and they’re going to tell the next person and the next person.
Sean: It’s such a great thing to see local music supported, but you touched on the wonderful City of Fremantle. I think one of the last shows we reviewed when you were touring was actually the Black Fingernails tour, when you were playing the album start to finish. What was it like to go back to that album and have to kind of go through the whole album and relearn the songs, some that I’m guessing aren’t played live in your set?
Kav: Yeah, there was definitely one or two of songs we’d never played live, like we just did it in the studio and that was that. But I guess, you know, the lucky thing with albums like ‘A Song is the City’ and ‘Black Fingernails Red Wine’, when you’re in the earlier albums of your career, you know, you don’t have that many songs to play live. So you end up playing most of the songs on your record. So we, luckily enough, you know, had played a lot of those songs before, and we’d taken a lot of time and energy to make those albums. You know, we had to made sure every song was perfectly led to the next song. So it was actually just really lovely going out and letting the albums do the work. You know, we’d already done all that hard work. We just had to remember how to play the songs, as you said. And then, you know, we’d play one song and then have to go off stage, have a bee and then come on and do another one [laughs]. It was very luxurious. I could do that forever.
Sean: And to play in your home city as well, down at the Arts Centre, makes it even more special. Great venue down there.
Kav: Yeah, it was pretty special because especially with albums like ‘A Song is the City’, which I wrote about being in Fremantle and we were kind of stuck in a bit of a musical purgatory when we wrote that album. We’d had a falling out with our record label and we didn’t know whether we’d ever get to release an album again. So we went about just writing the album. And we were there for two years, so we kind of wrote two albums in that time and got to boil it down to one album, but they were about all of our friends and family because we weren’t going anywhere at that point and so a lot of those people were in the crowd that night, you know, and people who I lived with at the time or who were my friends and they were like, oh my God, you know, like trip down memory lane.
So I think it was special for us, but it was also special for our community as well.
Sean: Yeah, wonderful. Well, Kav, before I let you go I just wanted to ask a couple of general questions. My restaurant question, if you could invite three musicians dead or alive to join you for a bit of dinner, who would you have sat with you for the evening?
Kav: Let me think… Beck. I don’t know if he’d be a great dinner party guest, but God, he would be an amazing person to sit down at the table with and have a chat because I’m a big fan. I mean, he’s one of those artists who I love and use as a benchmark all the time. You’d have to have a Beatle at the table and it would probably be Paul McCartney. He would probably be better company but John Lennon is always my Beatle of choice, so I’d actually have to say John Lennon. Then you might want to make it a little bit interesting for yourself and have someone who’s got a bit of a story to tell like so maybe someone like Dusty Springfield could be interesting you know. Made some great records, kind of fell from grace to a certain extent but fascinating character, so yeah off the top of my head that would be my three people to the dinner party.
Sean: Cool table. What was the last album you listened to?
Kav: The last album that I’ve kind of been listening to and just going “wow that is an amazing piece of music” that’s come out recently? I mean I’m listening to stuff all the time so it’s a really hard question but Idles… the new Idles record ‘Tangk’ I thought was just amazing. I don’t know if you’ve heard them. I hadn’t really clocked them before but they’re kind of like a seminal punk-ish kind of… I don’t know how you’d explain them but they’re kind of like this quite heavy English kind of punk, heavy music right and then they went and made an album with Nigel Godrich, who made all the Radiohead records and a whole lot of Beck albums and stuff and they’d also got this guy who’s kind of famous on the internet, his name is Kenny Beats and he’s quite a famous kind of more electronic style beat producer and they’ve made this record which is just dense and like kind of one of the most interesting musical collections I’ve ever heard of and I think it’s a really interesting one. I just keep wanting to go back because I feel like there’s more to reveal in recent times. I was really inspired by that Zach Bryan album that came out. I think you’ll know that’s one of those really interesting moments where an album made by an artist who’s clearly a country artist makes the right album at the right time and it brings everyone over from the mainstream to country and then you know now Beyonce is making a country record and you know it’s just kind of one of those zeitgeist moments. But that Zach Bryan record was really really cool. You know another artist who’s kind of in the same world as Zach Bryan? I didn’t really love the whole album but the first two tracks off the Casey Musgrove album is really interesting. I kind of had pegged her as this quite commercial singer-songwriter but the first two songs are really good and so that’s all I’ll say. Go listen to the first two tracks of Casey Musgrove’s record.
Sean: Plenty for me to sink my teeth into. The very final question, before i let you go is if you could be credited with writing any song ever written, what song would you choose?
Kav: If there was royalties on happy birthday then that’d be a good one – you’d be a rich man [laughs] but god it’s a really tricky question. I mean that’s a kind of like “what album would you bring to a desert island” kind of question but you know like if I was going to talk about a song that I wish I wrote then ‘Jealous Guy’ is probably up there as a song that I love because I mean being such a huge Beatles fan, I’ve analysed all of their chords forever and they kind of had this kind of like formula of chords that would follow the melody and I feel like ‘Jealous Guy’ and in The Beatles world is the perfect distilling of that idea. The chords just kind of effortlessly follow this melody and it does The Beatles chord thing perfectly and if I’m at a wedding and someone’s like, “you need to sing a song”, I’ll always do the Donny Hathaway version of ‘Jealous Guy’.
Sean: Fantastic answer. Kav thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on the single and wait with baited breathe for another later this year.
Kav: Thanks for taking the time out to chat and for the support Sean.