Eskimo Joe

It's been a couple of years since Eskimo Joe converted their alternative credibility into mainstream success with their 
huge sophomore album 'A Song Is A City'. That was a couple of years of endless touring, hectic promotion, ARIA awards 
and national spotlight. Now, the band are gearing up to release their third record 'Black Fingernails, Red Wine', 
meaning another inevitably full-on couple of years. So, talking to him on day one of those "Very long two years," I 
ask frontman Kav Temperley how he's been preparing himself over the last couple of weeks and the answer is not one I 
was expecting.

"Well, I'm just getting drunk at home as much as I possibly can, 'cause I'm aware of the fact that once I hit the road, 
I will have to stop getting drunk and knuckle down and do my job," Temperley tells me matter-of-factly. "We take it pretty 
seriously. I had a terrible night's sleep last night, 'cause all I did was overly think everything. At about six o'clock 
in the morning I decided that I've recorded the record - the rest is in the hands of fate, basically."

Temperley will be hoping that fate serves the 'Joe well, because he's pretty happy with his part in the proceedings. He 
has no doubt that 'Black Fingernails, Red Wine' is a marked improvement on 'A Song Is A City'. "The thing I'm really 
proud of is that with this record you can play any song and it all sounds like it's from the same record," he figures. 
"I think with 'A Song Is A City', you had stuff like Life Is Better With You next to From The Sea, and it still felt 
like we were finding our feet a little bit. This time we felt like we could just sit down and write on a theme and 
really enjoy that, because now we feel like we have a bit of longevity. We made it to album number three, which is a 
real polarising moment for bands. It's a real kind of test of whether bands are gonna hang around or fade away."

The most obvious trait of 'Black Fingernails' is its underlying darkness. This time, the band stepped up to the production 
chair, and Temperley explains to me how they focused on stripping back their sound, replacing power-chord thrashing guitars 
with subtle, piano-driven riffs, resulting in a sombre, very '80s sounding record. Thematically, it also seems quite dark, 
specially when compared with the joyful exuberance of the band's debut LP 'Girl'. When combined with that new-found sense 
of cohesion Temperley spoke of, two words spring to mind: concept record. "Yeah it is a little bit, but for me every album 
starts as a concept record! It's more fun to write concept records, you know?" he laughs. "It gives you a constant 
inspiration to go back to; you keep going back to the source of an idea and everything kind of revolves around that. I 
really think records should be like books - they should have a real beginning, middle and end, and little twists and 
plot turns and so on, and that's why on this record you have Comfort You, which is really ideally written as an opening 
track on the record...and How Does It Feel was written as an ending song on the record. When people write books, that's 
how they write: they write the opening chapter, and they write the final chapter, and they write the in-between bits, I 
like it when records have that complete feel."

It's not a new idea for the band - I poke to Temperley leading up to the 2005 Big Day Out, and he described the band's 
debut 'Girl' as the "Honeymoon album," and 'A Song Is A City' as the "Break-up album," which naturally leads me to ask 
him just what 'Black Fingernails, Red Wine' is in the grand Eskimo Joe scheme of things? Temperley pauses, musing on this 
for a while, before answering: "'Black Fingernails, Red Wine' is the descent into darkness and loving it!"

And, if you have any doubts as to whether Temperley speaks truthfully, just remember that the video for the lead single 
and title track that you see on Video Hits on a Sunday morning is a reshoot - the original one copped an M rating, after 
it featured the band kidnapping and burying three unsuspecting innocents who turned out to be themselves. Temperley laughs 
about the whole thing, but the laugh is laced with malice: "I like the idea of the new Eskimo Joe killing the old Eskimo 
Joe, because the new Eskimo Joe is evil!"