In 2010, Tame Impala released an album that would change the course of modern psychedelic prog. InnerSpeaker took Kevin Parker on a journey from western Australia’s underground clubs to international arenas and led to him becoming a sought-after music producer. Prog takes the reluctant rock star on a trip down memory lane to celebrate the LP’s 10th anniversary reissue.

Words: Dave Everley

Even before he became famous, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker had no time for rock’n’roll showboating. Whipping audiences up into a frenzy? That was someone else’s job.

“The bands that rose to the top were always the crowd-pleasers,” says Parker of the scene in his hometown of Perth when he was starting out in the mid-00s. “I always thought that was so lame. For us, the more zonked out the crowd were, the more they were into it.”

Shaky phone camera footage on YouTube backs this up. A short clip filmed at a small Australian festival in September 2008 sees the then-three piece playing on some backwater stage to a sparse crowd, most of whom are sprawled in the sun. Not that Parker cares – he’s got his head down, noodling away. The audience could be doing naked cartwheels for all the attention he’s paying them.

That stubborn refusal to please other people has never left Parker. When he released the first Tame Impala album, 2010’s InnerSpeaker, what psych rock scene there was existed largely underground – which is, by rights, where this cultish Australian band whose warm-bath psychedelic pop wreathed in spliff smoke should have remained. Yet the album launched the man who made it on a journey that has seen him become a bona fide pop star and the collaborator of choice for everyone from Kanye West to Lady Gaga.

InnerSpeaker – the 10th anniversary edition is out now.

PRESS/TAME IMPALA

A new deluxe reissue of InnerSpeaker is a reminder of just how far Parker has travelled, but how little distance he’s really come. The rippling, disco funk of Tame Impala’s 2020 album The Slow Rush may sound a world away from InnerSpeaker, but both draw on the same spirit of adventurousness and refusal to bow to exterior influences. Kevin Parker’s peers have changed, but Parker himself hasn’t.