Temples - Who's afraid of pop?

by Guia Cortassa and Stefano Macchi

Even before releasing their debut album "Sun Structures" in early 2014, Britain's Temples had already managed to grab the wider public's attention thanks to a string of singles that, amid the great new psychedelic wave, brought back the sounds of Sixties England, earning them, in a very short time, a position of real prominence on today's music scene. I meet them in San Francisco, backstage at the Great American Music Hall, where tonight they'll play fresh off their first Coachella weekend. Chatting with me after soundcheck are bassist Thomas Warmsley and multi-instrumentalist Adam Smith.

You're from Kettering, in Northamptonshire, a small town in the Midlands. What's your relationship with your hometown: is it a positive inspiration or something that pushed you to look for an escape?

Thomas Warmsley: Yeah, we're from Kettering, which is a small, isolated town, but not by design. The Midlands are close enough to the cities, but also far enough away to feel like a place cut off from everything. Still, there's a music scene, even if a very small one, there are venues and all that. Sure, growing up there is a bit more complicated, especially if you're a musician, because you have to travel more to play shows or go to gigs in nearby cities.

As for inspiration, I think it gave us the time and space to reflect more before forming the band and putting out the album. We'd all already lived and worked in other cities, I studied in London, but we had to move back to Kettering, as it happens, for the band to come together, so, yeah, we owe a lot to where we're from and I wouldn't change that for anything in the world.

You recorded the album in James's (Bagshaw, the band's singer, ed.) home studio, in Kettering, self-producing it. How did you end up working with Claudius Mittendorfer and Heavenly Recordings? Did you find them or did they find you?

Adam Smith: It was our management that had contacts with Heavenly.

Tom: Yeah, it was thanks to management. We're very self-sufficient when it comes to recording, in all its stages: writing, producing, recording – we even managed to do some of the mastering ourselves without knowing all that much about it. But I think mixing records is black magic. We really clicked with Mittendorfer, he had a lot of respect for what we'd already done and he simply managed to give everyone enough room to speak up more, which I think is a kind of genius. What do you reckon, Adam?

Adam: Yeah!

I read in one of your previous interviews that you want to write pop songs, without any specific psychedelic sound in mind - is that really the case?

Tom: Yeah, we've never intentionally tried to be... anything! [laughs]

Adam: We all love pop music... we're not afraid of pop.

Tom: Yeah, absolutely, the artists or bands we all love in common write pop music. It seems to me it all depends on where you want to take a pop song, and you can take it pretty far.

On your page on the Heavenly Recordings website you're described as a band with a West Coast sound - what do you think of that?

Tom: Yeah, that's one of our influences, I think. Maybe, on first listen, if someone stumbles across "Shelter Song", they might think it sounds like the Byrds or something like that...

Adam: But that's just that one song, right? I don't really think our sound is West Coast, it's probably a minor influence.

Tom: Yeah, maybe it's just that track, that kind of blurriness, that flou - flou is very British, isn't it? - it gets taken into account more than we actually do it, there's a lot of fading, a lot of hazy West Coast records inspired our guitars, that's where it comes from.

I actually think your sound is more distinctly British than West Coast.

Adam: Yeah, I think so too.

Tom: Yeah, but then on some tracks it also sounds a bit German, in the opening of...

Adam: Somewhere, maybe, Welsh.

Tom: Yeah, Welsh and other Celtic places.

Your style and your look are openly inspired by the hippie era and glam...

Adam: Hippies? [laughs] We're not hippies at all!

Generally speaking, where does this love for the Sixties and Seventies come from, if it's there at all?

Adam: It's there, that influence is all over us, right? But where does it come from?

Tom: I think it's something that fascinates us

Is it because of something you listened to growing up, something you discovered later, I don't know...

Adam: I think we all discovered it at different times and separately...

Tom: Yeah, everyone liked it...

Adam: When we started hanging out together, even before the band, it was something we found along the way, which is really nice. I wasn't listening to that stuff when I was younger.

Tom: Yeah, me neither.

What were you listening to back then?

Adam: Junk, whatever was on the radio.

Tom: Growing up we probably listened to whatever came our way. Yeah, there were a few records that somehow set us on a path...

Adam: But only on the surface.

Tom: Yeah, over the last two years we've started digging much deeper into music, finding great records that then led to other discoveries, we could go on forever down a family tree of finds.

Adam: It seems to me that we search everywhere, which is really nice.

Tom: And yeah, I think music and fashion go together, it's simply a way of expressing yourself, we don't think about it much.

A name you're often associated or compared with is Tame Impala. Do you see yourselves in that comparison?

Adam: I can understand why people do it, but we don't want to sound like anyone else. They're fine. It's understandable.

No, I don't want to stir up any controversy, I just think your two bands are pursuing completely different paths, that's why I'm asking.

Tom: I think their sound is great, they're a band born in the studio, their records are very sophisticated in that sense - that's something we'd like to focus on too - they're very... introspective? I don't know. Anyway, we like them, they're an excellent band.

To record your album you used both vintage gear and digital equipment, like drum machines. How do you manage to make these two things coexist?

Adam: Magic!

Tom: It's very easy to push the boundaries further these days, when it comes to recordings. It would be crazy to ignore the technology we have nowadays. We tried to get the sound we wanted by any means possible, whether analog or digital is irrelevant.

You're here in San Francisco, the birthplace of psychedelic music, how does that feel?

Adam: But wasn't it Canterbury?

Tom: Adam, we're in the United States, things are a bit different here, this isn't England! Well, it's our first time here...

Adam: We haven't had the chance to go around yet.

Tom: I think we have...

Adam: We only went to the laundromat to wash our clothes...

Tom: Yeah, we haven't managed to see Haight Ashbury and the Hills yet. But it's incredible to be in the city that's home to places like the Fillmore or the Great American Music Hall itself.

You just played Coachella, how was it?

Tom: Insane, our first American festival, with the sandstorm, we weren't expecting that

You also played SXSW…

Tom: True. Our second festival, then.

…and this summer you'll be on the bill at every major festival in the world. How do you feel about that? Your growth in terms of audience and venues has been incredibly fast!

Tom: Yeah, it's strange, it's already hard enough just to manage a UK tour, let alone coming to America and playing festivals. It's pretty strange.

Adam: And besides, it's still just the four of us, nobody expected anything more than what we'd already achieved a couple of years ago.

So, do you feel comfortable in front of such big crowds?

Tom: Yeah, our growth has always happened in full view of everyone as a band, there's nothing to hide in what we do now, it's all very honest, I think.

Adam: Yeah, we grew up as a live band, in front of an audience.

Tom: Yeah, so we're not anxious about how a show might go or how we'll sound, I think people have gotten used to that about us ever since we started as a band.

Adam: And it's also a lot of fun.

As we just said, your success came very quickly. In your opinion, what worked in your case?

Adam: I think it's having good, catchy songs. Approaching pop from a new angle.

Tom: I don't know, I think it's the way we thought about the album, we had a strong idea from the start of how we wanted it to be, we wanted to add something that hadn't been well explored, or at least not for a long time, which is the experience of listening to a record from start to finish, adding a message to it, that was something we really cared about achieving.

Adam: The concept was clear from the start too.

Tom: Yeah, and the way we wanted to work with the music; it seems to me that everything has a visual path that can fascinate people and make them listen to the record in its entirety, which is our idea of the LP, and the audience got it. Long live the LP!

One last question for you: your track "The Guesser" was chosen as the soundtrack for a French car brand's commercial…

Adam: Oh, really?

Tom: Seriously?

Yes!

Adam: We didn't know that!

You didn't know?

[they laugh]

Adam: But is it already on TV?

Yes! What do you think about it?

Tom: Great!

Adam: I think I saw those emails but we just ignored them, so then they went ahead and did it. But we like cars… What car was it?

I don't know, sorry…

Tom: I don't know… I feel like we've sold out… [laughs]

Adam: That just drives us crazy… beep beep!