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.
By the end, the standing area in the Hydro had become a heaving dancefloor
Most of the time, however, the Tame Impala live concept conformed to a more conventional band format, while the staging embraced all the bells, whistles, lasers and light shows demanded of the modern concert experience. Performing on a set that resembled a vast spaceship looming out into the arena, the sole point of human relatability was Parker himself, a bearded, long-haired, amiable kind of dude whose dressed-down casualness represented the antithesis of any rock-star posturing. Perhaps that was why, during a mid-set pause, a hand-held camera followed him into the bowels of the auditorium while he embarked on a live-streamed bathroom break. I looked away only to discover rubble from the fourth wall strewn around my feet.
As for the music, Parker has largely consigned his gift for writing shimmering pop melodies to the material he writes for and with his more mainstream pop collaborators. It has left the latest Tame Impala songs somewhat shy of the kind of hooks routinely conjured on earlier records. The new album, Deadbeat, skews towards house and rave rather than pop and psychedelia, yet, in a live setting, the fact that several of its tracks shaded into anonymity felt beside the point. The show was a superbly executed dance between light and sound, a fully immersive wave of beats and spectacle that crashed over any inconsistencies in song quality.
Highlights included the blissful ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’, which was never a hit in the conventional sense but has ended up being played everywhere anyway. At the Hydro, it found its perfect visual analogue, performed to a burst of rainbow lights arcing overhead. The chugging, bluesy ‘Elephant’ still sounded like a dozen glam, garage and stoner-rock songs all jostling for supremacy in some suburban basement. The light, disco-fied ‘Dracula’ was both sonically innovative and effortlessly catchy.
As the night wore on, the colours created by the music and those beamed by the light show bled into each other. ‘Let It Happen’ was a piledriver fired from a confetti gun. On ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’, the precipitous bass drop combined thrillingly with strobes, lasers and more confetti. By the end, the standing area in the Hydro had become a heaving dancefloor, the club experience rendered in maximalist Technicolor.
It was both joyful and strangely melancholic. Dig beneath the ravey doof-doofs on Deadbeat and Parker often sounds conflicted and browbeaten by success. I watched the final confetti splurge as it rained from the heavens and wondered whether this was where that ‘lonerist’ had imagined himself ending up, all those years ago.
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