Eskimo Joe dive into the memories with new single and acoustic tour

Eskimo Joe have returned this year with their first single in five years, The First Time. To celebrate, the Perth trio will take the nostalgic new track around the country on an acoustic tour, with regional WA shows at Red Earth Arts Precinct, Karratha, on Friday, June 21, Carnarvon Civic Centre on Saturday, June 22, Albany Entertainment Centre on Friday, June 28, and Esperance Civic Centre, on Sunday, June 30, with tickets on sale now. ALEIGHSHA GLEW caught up with vocalist Kav Temperley to find out the story behind the new track and what fans can look forward to when they hit the stage.

Congratulations on the release of your new single, The First Time. Given that it’s been five years since you last released a single, how does it feel to release a new one?

It feels really good. I mean, we managed to squeeze out a few singles through the beginning of the COVID times. I don’t know why we decided that was a good time to do it. We hadn’t made music since our last release in 2013, so for some reason, the world shut down, and we’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s release new music’. That was great because it was us just getting back into it and having some fun. A lot of it was done in isolation because we’d kind of send each other stuff across Australia because one of us lives in Melbourne now.

This particular song was great because we’ve now just been out playing shows. We ended 2023 by playing a whole bunch of shows, from pub shows to finishing off with this huge festival called Good Things, which was like playing the Big Day Out. It was like 30 thousand deep, and it was just an amazing feeling. We kind of got that energy, like there’s tangible energy when you play in front of a crowd and you have a whole group of people singing in your music back at you. It’s an amazing feeling, so we bottled that and got into the studio over the last week of December and the first week of January. We wrote The First Time and recorded it.

A lot of the shows we were playing had this real feeling of nostalgia, especially for our band. We seem to have hit this interesting purple patch where people are happy from all generations. This idea of nostalgia and the electricity of a live crowd. Again, we just put all those things together, and it felt like the most Eskimo Joe thing we’ve done in a long time. I felt like we’ve just been playing it live, and it just feels like it could sit, you know, on an album like Black Fingernails; it’s got that kind of feeling to it.

What inspiration did you draw on to create The First Time? And how was it different from a lot of the other works that you’ve put out in the past?

We’ve had songs where we’ve had this sense of nostalgia, but this just felt like a zeitgeist moment. This kind of nostalgic thing—we were looking back on this idea of the first crush on someone a long time ago, or the first time you smoked a cigarette, or all these kinds of things. We tend to look back at these things through rose-coloured glasses, not how they were, which is quite complex. It’s about that feeling—searching for that feeling of the first time again.

You draw on that nostalgia on the lyric video with a bunch of footage from previous years. What was the reason for using older footage, and how did you portray it in this song?

Well, I feel like the theme of the song is all about nostalgia, and a lot of that footage is interesting. Timothy Nelson is a local Perth musician with us in Eskimo Joe, and he’s so multi-talented. He just spent a year editing a weekly YouTube video of him writing a song, which was just a ridiculous undertaking. We said to him, ‘do you want to put together a lyric video?’ He was like, ‘absolutely’, so we gave him all of this stuff and access to all of these archives, and he put it together.

It was interesting because we looked at a lot of that footage for a long time. There was footage of us on Channel V, on video clips, and at the ARIAs. We don’t hang out on the weekend and revisit footage of us at the ARIAs, winning ARIA awards; it’s just not what we do. It was cool for us, like a beautiful surprise to look back at that era in our lives, and again felt completely appropriate to what the song was about.

You recently performed at Perth’s first-ever Lookout Festival with bands like Incubus and Live. What was the experience like?

It was great. I mean, that whole festival felt like a nostalgia fest. There are a lot of those bands, maybe apart from Birds of Tokyo, who were around in that kind of late 90s to mid-noughties times. All the people who were coming along to those gigs, it was about 12 thousand people per show, and we did about four of them around the country. It was this feeling of like, ‘This is a generation of people who will still probably own our albums on CD’.

It’s pretty amazing for us because we do these shows now and we have people up in the front row, and some of them are in their early 20s, and they were probably like five years old in a shopping trolley being pushed around Woolies at the time. Black Fingernails Red Wine played on the PA, and then you got people who are in their 60s and 70s who got into us when we first released the song getting into it too. So we had this huge generational span of people coming along for the shows. We saw heaps of that stuff, which was cool.

You will be heading around the country soon to do a national acoustic theatre tour. What are you looking forward to about getting back on the road and, in particular, playing some of this new music live?

We’ve actually done two shows already, which has been great. After a couple of years of playing rock and roll shows where we could just kind of wake up and go, it’s so ingrained that we know how to do that show. It’s really fun to get out there and do something different.

It’s just me, Stu and Joel, like the OG three-piece on stage, and a lot of it’s really just acoustic. It’s looking at the songs a bit more to see how they sounded when we first wrote them. It’s a much more intimate experience because we play the show, and then because they’re smaller shows, we get to come out and meet everyone afterwards. We’ll go to the merch desk.

Generally, I tell these really big, long-winded stories when I’m on stage because it’s acoustic. It’s different from a rock and roll show. So, I tell these big, long stories, and usually, at the end of the show, I’m like, ‘Hey, I’ve just spent the whole time telling stories. I want to hear your stories now. We’re going to come down to the merch desk and say hello’. People do tell us their stories, and they’re amazing.

This one family on the weekend; this guy immigrated to Australia from Japan in 2006, and the first two albums that he bought were Eskimo Joe albums. He became obsessed with us, and then he had children. His kids were up the front at Things Festival, like rocking out, and that’s mind-blowing. So, the whole family was there, like a big part of their Australian experience. Even though all the kids were born in Australia, we’re associated with that experience, and I find that stuff absolutely like goosebumps on the skin stuff.

So that’s one of the cool things about doing those acoustic shows. It’s just a different feeling than doing a rock and roll show. Even if I go out to the merch desk after a rock and roll show, people’s energy is different.

What’s next for Eskimo Joe? Other than the tour, is there anything exciting coming up that we can look forward to?

There will be a few cool announcements coming up. For WA, I can’t talk about it just yet, but pay attention to the socials, and you will see cool stuff being announced. We’re going into 20 years of From the Sea coming out, which is cool. We have some amazing concept footage of when we played Black Fingernails and From the Sea back to back at the Fremantle Arts Centre, so we’re hoping to edit that into a full-length movie and release that online for fans because it was such a magical experience, so that’ll happen. We’ll do a bunch of these acoustic shows that take us through until about August.

We’re going all over WA. We’re going down to Albany and Esperance and up to Karratha and Carnarvan, which will be great. I’m not sure what the plans are for the later part of the year. The First Time was received so well, so we’ll probably try to get another song recorded and put it out before the year’s out, but no promises because we’ve only half-written it.

We’re not in that cycle where there’s pressure for us to jump in and record a record or do any of those things, so we just work on music, and if we think something is good enough to record, we’ll put it out. Hopefully, we’ll do another one of them before the year finishes.