Brand New Day

"We played at the oldest working theatre in Australia last night and it had a haunted bathroom, so every time you went for a wee, like, midstream you'd get really scared. Everyone was putting off going for a wee all night.”

Not the typical rock'n'roll anecdote one hears from tales on the road: more of an awkward ice-breaker. But then Eskimo Joe never claimed to be a typical rock'n'roll outfit, according to singer and bassist Kav Temperley. The Fremantle trio kicked off their now indisputably solid career in the throes of Western Australia's indie rock uprising in the late '90s, launching themselves onto the fickle scene with indie rock pop gems like Who Sold Her Out and Sweater. Then came the record contracts and a push towards a rockier sound. By the time Black Fingernails, Red Wine arrived in 2006, it came as no surprise to anyone when the lads won ARIAs, APRAs and WAMis all to the tune of 'best rock band', that is except Temperley, guitarist Stuart Macleod and drummer/guitarist Joel Quartermain.

“We never try to make the same record twice,” Temperley stresses. “And I think, and it's no fault of anybody, that what happened post-Black Fingernails, Red Wine is that we started to make those kind of records. We didn't really consider ourselves a rock band. We came from Freo indie pop, listening to things like Blur and Grandaddy. And then we ended up in this world where people were like, 'Oh, you guys are this big rock band'. And we were like, 'Are we? Oh okay'. So we got stuck with that for a while but then it started to get a bit boring.”

At the close of the promotion cycle for Eskimo Joe's fifth album Ghosts Of The Past, that had last year's highly rotated single Love Is The Drug, Temperley reflected on it via their website and said the band felt “dusty”. With an album released every other year and masses of touring in between, he says the band's hectic work schedule was a wake-up call. “I just felt exhausted by everything, by the industry, by the kind of Groundhog Day of we do a tour, then we sit down and write a record, we record the record, we do a tour,” Temperley admits. “You know, a bit of the spontaneous magic goes out of it.

“It wasn't like I was going to quit the industry and go and work on a farm or something, but I needed a complete change of pace and direction. So I put that to the guys and said, 'We've gotta do something different, I'm fucking over this'. And they were like, 'Yep, cool let's do it'. So we sat down and we had a lot of fights in the first few weeks of recording because everyone has a different idea of what the new sound should be.”

After a year-and-a-half of writing songs for new album Wastelands, Temperley says the band eventually arrived at the same place at the same time. Enter Gerling's Burke Reid. The Joe approached the now esteemed producer to oversee what was going to be their sixth album. And his response?

“He said, 'You know guys, I'm not really a fan of what you've done [in the past]',” Temperley laughs. “And we said, 'That's fine, because that's not what we're doing this time'. We'd been following his stuff for a while and he'd been developing a reputation for getting bands to make a left-hand turn, and quite successfully. We sent him a couple of demos and he said there's definitely something in there, keep sending them. So he came over and we just went for it, and he was really great at pushing us out of our comfort zones.”

Another aspect of the Joe's foray into new territory was the Pozible funding campaign behind Wastelands. While Temperley rejoices that it banished the line between the band and their fans created by their former relationship with Warner, Grinspoon's Phil Jamieson called shenanigans on the move, saying, “Eskimo Joe shouldn't need to go to those sort of lengths, considering their past success.” “I think he's getting as much press out of this as we are!” Temperley laughs. “Bless, someone's got to keep it interesting.”