How To Go James Bond With Help From Tame Impala

Hungry Sky was a strong follow-up to the already successful debut from Felicity Groom, Gossamer. Featured on the latest record are a host of guest performers, including Tame Impala members Kevin Parker, Jay Watson and Julien Barbagallo. It’s enough to make your mouth water, but for Groom it was just like normal friendly catch-ups. A lot of the album was recorded in Groom’s lounge room and then produced by Parker himself. 

“Kevin [Parker] and I recorded a few songs, then he went away – I did heaps to it, and then he came back and chucked in some stabby guitar lines, which was really cool. He helped me record that James Bond-esque keyboard sound, so he was definitely a vibe bringer.”

The latest single, Oh Jesus, came to fruition on a Broadway stage, written for a play called Tinkertown. “I wrote it for the play, and it just made it into the set! The bassline on Oh Jesus brought the vibe up a bit because it was quite bleak and dark, and it made it onto the album and now it’s become a single.”

Similarly, the accompanying clip features Groom performing the song in front of the bright Broadway lights, and again, she requested assistance from a range of local talent. “My friend Poppy Van Oorde-Grainger – she’s Dutch and English – she was doing film and she did Better Days [another of Groom’s songs] with her crew. During studio time I asked her to come in and we’d shoot some stuff. Myself and Dom Pearce did most of the editing and made it groovy. It was pretty on the spot, just having a bit of fun. Mei Saraswati is an amazing artist and she does these paper cut-outs – I have a few actually because I put on an exhibition once and she didn’t pick them up – some of them I featured in the clip between the lights and me, so the projections were hers.”

Groom’s currently gearing up to head over east to tour Oh Jesus, where she’s hoping to develop new ideas for her next record, which is currently in the early stages of being built. “I’ve been working on the third album, which is cool. I’ve been doing this course with a guy called Josh Hogan who runs this thing called Ableton Noisemaker Course. Ableton’s got this interface called Push and I learnt how to use that. He does heaps of courses basically, and as soon as I finish tour I want to do heaps more of them. So yeah, working on number three, which is going to be heaps more beats orientated. I’m doing it all by myself at the moment so it’s very early days... This tour’s quite hectic because it’s a town a night sort of deal, so it’s not as relaxed as some of the other tours I’ve been on, but I guess I just think better when I’m on the road. New places create new stimuli which, in turn, feeds into creative ideas, so that’ll help with the album.”