Eskimo Joe's Kav Temperley By Cameron Adams August 24, 2006 12:00am Article from: Herald-Sun THE Herald Sun's music writer Cameron Adams talks with Kav Temperley of Eskimo Joe about the band's biggest tour to date. How did you celebrate your album Black Fingernails, Red Wine going to No.1? We were in Perth. It was Australia vs Brazil in the World Cup that night. We bought a whole lot of champagne and hung out at Joel's (Quartermain) apartment. He has this ridiculously oversized TV he bought from a bar that was closing down. It's like a novelty, humungous TV in this tiny apartment. We celebrated in there. It stayed put for three weeks . . . Yeah, then I thought, 'We've had our time. We've done our No.1 spot. I should be happy with that.' We'd just got back from overseas. I was sitting eating meatballs in my kitchen and I got a call saying we were back at No.1 and that tripped me out more than the first time. Then you were bumped off No.1 by High School Musical . . . Well, you know, you've got to step away for the musical genius that is High School Musical. Is it still surreal to see yourself in the Top 5? I tend not to really pay too much attention to it. That old myth about believing the hype, it can get to you. When we start doing press or we start to get played on the radio I tend to not look at the chart. I don't listen to the radio. I don't like to consume myself with that. People can write the best review and as soon as they say something even slightly critical, you're like 'You bastards!' It's so stupid and I hate what that kind of feeling does to me, so I just avoid it and focus on the good bit, which is playing the music. You just did your jaunt overseas to try to secure an international record deal. How did it go? It went really well this time. We had an ill-fated trip two years ago. That was pretty traumatic but, hey, I got some good songs out of it. This time it was more realistic. Three lots of record-company people would come through each day. We'd play four songs, shake their hands, charm them a little bit. The next step is whether the main man wants to give us ridiculous amounts of money. I think they're either going to release it or they're not going to release it. There'll be no in-between and I'm happy about that. And there was just a bit of a bidding war locally because your deal with Warner expired ... We're just about to re-sign our new deal (with Warner) and it's pretty freaking sweet! It's a great time to be re-negotiating, then? Yeah, it was all going on when we were No.1. We didn't try to do anything too cheeky, like ask for a million dollars or Rolls-Royces delivered to our houses. We just looked into our future and tried to get reasonable recording advances and good royalties. We just tried to set ourselves up so we could keep making records for the next 10 years. Are you excited about the ARIAs this year? I get butterflies in my stomach thinking about it. This has been our biggest year and any band who says they don't want to win an ARIA is lying. Basically this year it's Wolfmother vs Eskimo Joe. Wolfmother has had a pretty amazing two years. It could go either way. On your last album it was Eskimo Joe vs Jet at the ARIAs ... That was an unrealistic thing. Jet was f---ing huge. There was a lot of good will in the industry for us. We got told afterwards we lost by two votes for most awards, which I didn't really want to know. This time around I'm not going to get too antsy about it, but if we don't win one I'll be spewing. Are you going to go on a charm-the-industry mission like Hollywood does at Oscar time? If they're not charmed by us now they'll never be charmed by us. It's down to good will and good karma. If we've been nice to people on our way up, hopefully they'll vote for us. Are people still shouting out for your first single Sweater at gigs? Only every single gig. I don't think people know the song any more. They just know the chant. It's gone to God though, hasn't it? It went to God six years ago. I don't even know why people ask us for it any more. We had this sick fantasy though . . . there's talk of us opening up the ARIAs this year, and we had this idea. Obviously this is our moment of moments, we've worked all these years to be considered a serious rock band. We've released this album that's gone to No.1. All these dreams are being realised. So at the ARIAs it'd be "Ladies and gentlemen, Eskimo Joe" and then we start playing Sweater. It would be so f---ing cool. We've denied that song for years. People would go nuts. It would be so funny, but you know what, that's not going to happen. It'd be great if we didn't care; unfortunately, we do. It's like an evil spirit that song. You can't even mention its name around us. You're working on new material. Is the stadium-rock thing out of your system? When we started promoting this record we said to everyone, "This is a our stadium-rock record. We're having fun, being light-hearted, creating this myth, smoke and mirrors, blah blah blah." We were feeding everyone a line and everyone ran with it. It was fantastic. No one ever does that with the press any more in Australia. Everyone's so earnest. This is a serious and dark record, but it's just an Eskimo Joe record. It's not a f---ing stadium-rock record. But you write it on a piece of paper and every interview starts with, "So this is your stadium-rock record" and I'd say, "Yes, yes it is". It was fantastic seeing that stuff come out in print. It was like evil genius or something. Here's the exclusive. It's not a stadium-rock record. It's an Eskimo Joe record. It does have a lot of grunt, though. We tried to make a record with more space, a record that could be played in your bedroom or on a really big stage. Rather than put more stuff in, we took everything out. If you listen to early U2, like New Year's Day, there's not much going on, so there's room to resonate. As far as stadium rock goes, that's all we were trying to do. But it's like you've written your own script. It's making you one of the biggest bands in the country. Well, our theory was if we told everyone it was a stadium-rock record we'd get to play stadiums. We're playing pretty big venues in May, so the dream may come true. I don't know if we've totally pulled it off, but it's quite funny. We're almost ready to tell people we were pulling their legs.