The New Cue #277 April 17: James Acaster
The New Cue #277 April 17: James Acaster
"When you're dressing up as your childhood toy, you’ve got to start asking yourself questions about what you’re doing with your life..."
Good morning,
Today, we’ve got high-ranking and award-winning stand-up comedian, food and music podcaster, TV star, best-selling writer and all-round king of the castle James Acaster talking about his brilliant new collaborative music project, Temps, who will shortly be releasing their first album, Party Gator Purgatory. As he puts it, it’s a record for music nerds not for the casual Bake Off viewer. Anyway, read on to learn more. Should we watch James being funny on stage just to get us in the mood?
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Enjoy today’s edition in the meantime,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… James Acaster
Comedian James Acaster’s love of music is no great secret. He was a drummer in several bands before becoming a standup. In 2017 he devoted himself to purchasing and listening to over 500 albums released the previous year across any genre of music he could find, a project which grew into a successful book called Perfect Sound Forever, as well as a podcast series.
In May, James is releasing Party Gator Purgatory by Temps, a collaborative project involving forty musicians in which he drums and acts as a sort of executive producer/director. Far from being a celebrity vanity project, though, it’s a head-spinning mix of genres and sounds that flies into some pretty far-out territory. Bleedthemtoxins - featuring Joana Gomila, NNAMDI, Shamir, and Quelle Chris - in particular is brilliant. It’s a cosmic melange of jazzy hip hop and psychedelic R&B that lands somewhere between Sun Ra and Flying Lotus:
As you can see, it does have a video featuring James dressed up as the album’s eponymous Party Gator, so he hasn’t turned his back on comedy entirely. Chris called up James last week to find out how the album came together and what the Party Gator is currently up to…
Hi James, it’s Chris calling from The New Cue. Where are you?
I’m just at home.
I haven’t caught up with Celebrity Hunted yet so I wasn’t sure if you were on the run still.
No, it’s not recorded live. You don’t do press when you’re on the run.
Good, I didn’t want to accidentally give away your whereabouts. In a sentence, how would you describe your new musical venture, Temps?
I would say, it’s a music collective full of musicians from many different backgrounds, different genres, and all those genres colliding into one.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Party Gator Purgatory, but it really blew my mind at times. Did it catch you by surprise how it’s turned out?
Yeah. Because there wasn’t a plan from the outset. I wasn’t like, ‘I’m gonna make an album and this is what it’s going to sound like…’ So, it was a surprise as it went on. It started off as a little exercise during lockdown keeping me busy and bringing all these musicians on board and as it grew into an album. I got really excited about it and became obsessive with it, working on it every single day. With every contribution someone would send me, it was always surprising because it always changed the song completely and did something that I wouldn’t have predicted. It still feels like this magical thing. Even though I organised it, I don’t feel like I made it. It was a group effort. It still surprises me now because I still don’t know exactly what people were doing on it. I don’t know how they achieved those sounds or how they came up with the ideas. It’s definitely still surprising to me.
Prior to lockdown, what was the origin of the project?
I was going to take 2020 off stand-up anyway – ha ha ha. I was going to try and make a mockumentary based around me playing myself as a comedian but sidestepping from comedy into music. It was meant to be this whole parody and a bit of a joke about me making my own album. We made a 10-minute taster tape that we could start sending to channels and see if anyone wanted to pick it up. When lockdown was announced the project got canned and I just had hours and hours of drums that I’ve recorded during this taster tape. So I decided to start sending them to musicians who might also be bored during lockdown to see if they wanted to mess around with stuff. I was very lucky that I had a lot of contact details for a lot of musicians who I idolised because I’d interviewed them for Perfect Sound Whatever so I had all their emails. To begin with, I was just messing around with music these people had sent me. Had I been in the headspace of, ‘Okay, I’m gonna make an album…’ I might have freaked myself out. But instead, I was just like, ‘I’m just gonna mess around with whatever they send me or move it around and make sense out of it and send it to another musician. As it grew I thought, ‘If I’m going to contact more people, then I should probably commit to this as a full project…’ So that’s when it kind of became a proper album in my in my head.
Did the whole project of writing Perfect Sound Whatever [Acaster bought and listened to over 500 albums all released in 2016] change how you listened to and how you approached music?
Completely. It completely changed and expanded my taste in music. If I’d tried to make an album before doing that book and doing that project, it wouldn’t have sounded like this, it would have been a lot more limited. I wouldn’t have thought outside the box. I think now, anyone who engages in current music appreciates that genre is a thing of the past and the best music is just completely boundless. That’s a really exciting thing.
You were a musician before you starting doing comedy, but do you still have some trepidation about being seen as a comedian trying his hand at music?
Yeah, for sure. Anytime a comedian releases a serious music album I immediately write it off and don’t listen to it. So I don’t see how anyone is going to treat me any different. If I’m writing it off in my head, then I can’t expect anything else from anyone else. But at the end of the day, you can’t really control what anyone else does. Some people will give it a chance and listen to it. Some people won’t. We’ll just see what happens. There was a point where I considered not putting my name on it because it might put people off. But then I realised that would be unfair because loads of other musicians have their name on it and if it turned out that everyone hated the project, everyone else would have to take a hit and I’d get away with it. But yeah, totally, anyone who sees this and goes, ‘I’m not listening to that, he’s a comedian’, that’s totally fair enough. But I would make the distinction that I’m only playing drums on it and producing it, you will not hear my voice at any point. Also, I’m only one fortieth of this collective and everyone else is a full-time legit musician. So actually, ratio-wise, this is mainly an album by musicians.
You go to some really interesting places on the album also, you could find that someone who might only know you off the telly or from your podcast gets into some quite out-there music.
That would be wonderful. I’d love that, obviously. With the book and the music podcasts that I did that was the aim, to get people to realise how much good music there is out there at the minute being made on every single level. So that’d be great if that happened with this. Equally, anyone who might have found me quite funny on The Great British Bake Off who just happened to give this music a go on the basis of that… not all of them are going to be very happy. But at no point did we make this for everybody. Mostly what I was doing with this was to tailor it to my exact music tastes and having everything that I liked in music in just one thing. I felt like a bit of a spoiled brat being able to get all my favourite musicians to basically make my dream album for me. I think this is definitely an album more for music nerds than it is the casual Bake Off viewer.
It sounds a bit trite, but would it be fair to say that music was your first love?
Yeah, for sure. When I was a kid I was just doing anything creative all the time. Playing the drums, drawing cartoons and putting on little plays where I was acting and trying to be funny, making little radio shows on the tape player - just everything across the board. In my late teens, I thought I should probably pick one and music was the one that I loved the most so I threw myself into that. I was in several bands that tried to make it happen, but when my final band split up I didn’t have the energy to form another band and started doing stand up as just as a way of keeping myself busy. I didn’t think it would be my job and then I ended up really, really loving it and I’ve had ten years just working on it constantly, pretty much every single night. Now I feel really lucky that I’ve found my way back to music and I’ve actually been able to release an album which was my main dream as an adolescent. I’m incredibly lucky to have a career that allows me to do all these sort of things.
Can you tell us about the Party Gator itself?
That was a childhood toy. I won it at a fair when I was seven, the same year I got my drum kit and both of them were slightly unwelcome in the house. The drums because they were loud and the Party Gator because it was the size of a human being. But I was very stubborn all the way through my childhood and wouldn’t get rid of it. When I moved out of my parents’ house I took it with me and would move it into various flats and in house shares. Eventually my girlfriend at the time refused to let it into our flat so I had to leave it with some friends. In 2020 they insisted that I come and collect it as they were now a married couple and didn’t want it in their house. So I worked that into the mockumentary, making my character obsessed with this Party Gator and being reunited with it after all these years, going on about how the album was going to be all about the lifecycle of the Party Gator. I’m a big believer of accepting that when something has organically made its way into a project, just don’t question it and just follow that impulse. I didn’t worry that it might be a little bit comical. There are two versions of a comedian doing an album. One is that the album is a comedy album and the other is that it’s so serious and there’s absolutely no jokes whatsoever, but that’s just really weird and sterile. There’s loads of serious bands who do silly things. The Beatles were silly all the time. Eminem is silly. We’ve made some quite serious music at times and if it’s going to feature a six foot alligator with a pink top hat on then so be it.
Picture: Willow Shields
Where is the Party Gator living now?
Well, after I recorded the drums and had it in the studio with me I took my drums and the Party Gator to a school I used to work at for safe-keeping and they promptly threw the Party Gator in the tip without asking me. That’s why I had to have a Party Gator suit made for the music videos. It was quite sad and then you end up dressing up as your childhood toy, which is when you’ve really got to start asking yourself questions about what you’re doing with your life.
Thanks for talking to us James, and also for being a New Cue subscriber. I had a little look earlier and you have three stars next to your email which means you’ve opened it a few times recently. Out of curiosity I did look up Romesh Ranganathan, who also subscribes, and he’s got four stars next to his name though…
Well, Romesh doesn’t have much work on so he has more time than me to read them.
Cheers James.
Thanks man, have a nice evening.
CC
PARTY GATOR PURGATORY Featuring Shamir, NNAMDÏ, Open Mike Eagle, Quelle Chris & More is out on May 19 via Bella Union