Eskimo Joe: How It Works
Xpress
16.08.01
Julian Tompkin



Temperley is in demand. Every radio station, newspaper and magazine in the country wants to talk to him about Girl, the 
debut album from Fremantle’s favourite rock group.

It has been the talk of the town since Eskimo Joe began recording Girl in August 2000:  ‘Did you hear how much Eskimo Joe 
spent on their album?’ Figures have been thrown around like a busy day on Wall Street, that stretch up into the multiple 
hundreds of thousands. But, according to Temperley, if you want a decent product, you have to be prepared to pay for it.

“If you want to do something that sounds international, and we’re not going ‘Oh yeah, we’re just going to have an 
Australian release’, we’re thinking of it as an international release,” Temperley states firmly, “And you’ve really got to 
have a certain kind of standard and to record an album for 30 grand, you really can’t do that; you have to kind of actually 
go out and spend a bit of money, and the main money goes on really hiring a good studio and hiring a producer really.”

The choice of studio was the legendary Sing Sing in Melbourne, and the choice of producer was the infamously temperamental 
Ed Bueller – the man behind the sound of, among many, Ben Lee and Alex Lloyd. However, Temperley says that the original 
plan was not to spend large sums of cash, but when their record label Modular offered them the chance to record a first 
class release, ‘no’ was never a potential answer, and the line ‘You’ve been up all night spending other people’s money’ 
from the opening track to Girl, Head Hurts, begins to make sense.

“We were thinking, I’d like to put this album on next to a U2 record and go, ‘Yeah, cool’,” Temperley admits. “And I think 
that was the whole thing, like when we had this chance to kind of use a bit of extra money we were like, ‘Well, we really 
want to do something international.’ And to have that edge I think was why we went with an international producer because 
we’re always gonna have our ideas but we’re Australians and we grew up in Fremantle and blah, blah, blah…but it was good 
to have someone come in who is not exposed to that at all, who is strictly working on an international market basis, if you 
know what I mean. So that’s why we pretty much spent the extra money.”

Regardless of the money issue, life has changed for Temperley, drummer Joel Quartermain and guitarist Stu MacLeod. Hone are 
the days of putting down a couple of pop tunes for a few bob and in are the days of strategic management and grand plans, 
where issues like when to ‘drop’ the singles are high on the bands agenda.

Eskimo Joe are in the big league now, a band with a hefty national profile and a record deal that has the potential to make 
them true starts – and a tasty bottle of vin rouge is more likely to be discovered in the band’s rider these days than the 
usual stash of budget coldies. But there are just something you have to wait for.

“I’ve always hoped that someone would offer me a big line of cocaine, but it just never happened,” Temperley laughs 
suspiciously. “I don’t think it’s gonna happen until I can afford it myself. It’s all kind of learn as you go. You kind of 
thin, it all looks a bit scary then you learn bits and pieces. We’re pretty self sufficient, I’ve got a jam room at my 
place and we kind of sit back and drink cups of tea and smoke a few joints and demo our arse off, like that’s my favourite 
pastime – sitting back in my jam room and recording and wake up one day and go ‘I think I’ll have a Tom Waits day today’.”

Girl is nothing short of an amazing piece of art, slightly unexpected but evocative all the same. To think that Eskimo Joe 
were know for an explosion of pop bashery called Sweater, and another boisterous fuzz guitar piece entitled Turn Up Your 
Stereo, is kind of baffling when sampling Girl. Why? Because it is tender, happy, tormenting and uplifting – it does things 
to you head, when Eskimo Joe only ever did things to the feet in the past.

It’s a rainy day in Perth and Quartermain and MacLeod are enjoying a beer at The Subiaco Hotel, preparing for another day 
of gruelling press interviews on the eve of Girl’s release. Temperley is slightly reserved, sipping a soft drink, sitting 
back in his chair, but boyishly ecstatic about Girl’s final release.

“We’ve been working on it for a little while,” Temperley says softly. “Obviously it’s our debut album so we kind of wanted 
to get it right and so we did a lot of mixing and stuff afterwards, and the artwork took a while. It’s kind of been about a
 year in the making now. When we finished up with the recording we weren’t happy with a lot of the mixes so we did like a 
lot of the mixing again, in Freo, where we’d done the demoing, which was really good ‘case we could kinda like…we had a lot 
of time to sit back and really know what we wanted.”

Eskimo Joe have known what they wanted since the release of Sweater in ’98, according to Temperley, but there was no master 
plan. And Quartermain agrees.

“I think Eskimo Joe is just like…I don’t know, like a fate,” he says hesitantly. “Like we started jamming this really 
mellow, acoustic, folky Crowded House, Beatles sound and then we said, ‘Oh let’s write some rock tunes and enter Campus 
Bands’ and so we entered Campus Bands and we won and then we were just like swept up from there. And then we recorded our 
EP (Sweater) and totally didn’t expect anything other than just do a CD launch in Perth, and do what all the Perth bands 
do and then we heard the song on the radio six times a day and went ‘What the fuck?’ and then it just took off from there. 
And then we just got on a plane and went to the eastern states for three months without a plan just to see how long we 
could survive over there, and that was really good ‘cause it was tough – it was really tough.”

MacLeod has a theory on why Eskimo Joe have got to where they are now and why they have survived in this fickle industry 
and he calls in ‘Eskimo luck’. But the band members know what they want and they always managed to get it, so much so that 
they did the cheeky ‘indie’ thing of taking Ed Bueller’s finished, and highly expensive version of Girl back to Studio 
Couch in Fremantle and played with his mixes until they had what they wanted – an Eskimo Joe sound.

“He was trying to pull everything back but when we remixed it in Fremantle that’s when we added the weirder shit,” 
Quartermain laughs. “ He was just trying to make a straight rock album and we were kind of like working against that to 
make something that was a  bit more different – post rock, I guess. But then he went back to America and we did what we 
wanted anyway (laughs). We can’t wait to send it to him and email him and say ‘Suck shit’.”

But Bueller’s input is distinctly recognisable on Girl. In Love List, a tender diversion for Eskimo Joe, the band though 
they had a winner, but Bueller told them it was boring and sent them away with a hefty load of homework – to fix it. But 
his influence wasn’t always a depressing one, he also told them they needed two more singles to finish the record, pushing 
the band to record two of the best efforts on the album in the beautiful Planet Earth and the current single Who Sold Her 
Out.

The three members of Eskimo Joe make no secret of the fact that Girl is a definite and deliberate change of direction for 
them, and make no apologies either.

“We weren’t really thinking as three guys who’ve got to play this live, we’re a bit more kind of like ‘Let’s make a 
record’,” Temperley says, raising his voice.

“I think it was more ‘Lets try and adopt a different writing style’,” MacLeod continues. “Cause we used to write in the jam 
room but we were jamming this one time and it just wasn’t working and we’re all getting quite frustrated and we just went 
‘Look, we’re trying to play something we haven’t written yet. Let’s just fuck off all the instruments and sit down with an 
acoustic and actually work out the song before we try and work it out in the jam room’.”

Eskimo Joe have come a long way in a couple of years, including touring the country, being all over radio and giving the 
ultimate indie ‘up yours’ to the professional Ed Bueller but doing the final mix of Girl themselves. Seems it’s all smooth 
road ahead. Perhaps not, according to Temperley.

“The way I see it is we’re only just about to start doing the hard yards – we’ve got mega hard yards ahead of us…but at 
least we’ll have nicer places to stay while we’re doing the hard yards.”