Red Medicine Never Forget The Family
Perth five-piece Red Temples are set to launch their new single, Medicine Man, this Saturday, June 15, at Old Habits Neighbourhood Bar with guests WhoCares, Lazy Drive and Sailor Jager. BOB GORDON caught up with guitarist Chris Ellis and bassist Paul Dean to find out the story behind the band and their new release.
Al Pacino said it best as Michael Corleone in The Godfather III…
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
Granted, we’re talking rock’n’roll here and not running a crime syndicate, but the members of Perth band Red Temples well know what it’s like to be lured back into what they do best. Each has varied experiences of playing in bands in their youthful days of yore and each put band life aside once they settled down and had young families.
“That’s definitely the case,” says guitarist Chris Ellis, formerly of Perth bands Damien’s Trick, Afraid of Flying, The Darlings and Honeywheeler. “The last band I was in was when our daughter was being born, and it’s really quite a struggle juggling everything. So bands come and go, and that’s fine. That’s just life.”
“But then there was quite a gap, and I just wanted to get back into it.”
The motions to get back into it were stymied, however, when Ellis passed a band audition but was soon fired for being ‘too loud and too much of a blues player’. Suddenly the gloves were off, and the motivation to play was stronger than ever.
“As sort of a joke, I mentioned to my other mate, who was a guitarist, that I didn’t get that gig, and he’s like, ‘Oh, why don’t we just form a band?’ Then we started jamming from that, and that was like iteration one of Red Temples. We kept changing members as we were sort of building, and Paul (Dean, bass) joined two or three weeks in. So the fury of being fired just spurned another return to… fame? (laughs).”
“There’s a lot of overlap here,” adds Dean. Previously a guitarist who was the only member not to previously be in an active band, he was partially recruited because Ellis always thought ‘Deano’ was an excellent name for a bass player.
“The five of us are all dads, and our kids are approximately the same age as well,” he continues. “We were all coming to the same actual point where they’re not babies anymore, and we’re getting a little bit more free time back. I wouldn’t say we’re time-rich by any stretch, but it was that stage in all our lives where we needed something to look forward to that wasn’t work or family, that was a creative outlet.”
“We were drawn together, and it’s been two years with the current line-up now. I think we’re stronger now than we’ve ever been.”
The line-up also features Seath Churton on drums (of New Zealand bands Vent and Static Mine) and Phil Berrick (AKA renowned Perth DJ Philly Blunt) on keyboards. Last to join was vocalist/guitarist Jim Churchill, a one-time veteran of the Adelaide live scene who toured and performed at the Big Day Out with his band, The Egg. Having moved to Perth some years ago, his kids are at the same school as his bandmates.
“It was at the pub after a parent night, and he just came up to us and said, ‘by the way, your band is good. Can I have a go?’,” Ellis recalls. “Then the next Tuesday, he turned up and blew us away.”
“He came in and clicked immediately, and that really acted as a launchpad to write more songs,” Dean says. “It’s been really productive ever since. There’s currently 30+ song projects in the works. Adding that fifth member really turbo-charged the writing process for everyone.”
After taking a little time to find their sound, Red Temples focused on a hybrid of ‘90s-style indie with hues of soul, blues, reggae and rock. A weekend visit to Vision Studios in September 2022 to record a demo EP proved key in honing in on their natural feel and was a learning experience in terms of future recordings.
From that demo, the alt-country-tinged Concrete Boots was chosen as a single and uploaded to Spotify.
Dean describes the song as an outlier, and that status indicates the diversity of Red Temples, with other songs such as Come Hither inhabiting a dirtier, grungier tone that’s offset by Berrick’s elevating keyboards, Rise and Fall inhaling that beloved reggae feel, and Cloud Cover embracing an altogether more sombre mood.
Red Temples have since been working at Paul Wood’s (Red Jezebel, The Ghost Hotel, Good News Now We Can All Eat The Vampires) Tiny Music Studio on more songs, including the new single, the summery-sounding Medicine Man, launching this Saturday at Old Habits Neighbourhood Bar.
“Medicine Man is a song about new beginnings,” says vocalist-guitarist Churchill. “A chance encounter one day that takes you by the hand and changes how you see everything… and then discovering new meaning in all the things that are right in front of you.”
“It fits in the middle of our spectrum,” adds Dean, “but it has a really catchy, fun, holiday-ish, ocean feel to it. Generally, that’s where our songs tend to gravitate to. There’s a lot of nature in them.”
There’ll be a second single issued later this year, with the band hoping to have an EP ready to release in early 2025.
As a live experience, Red Temples give it all they’ve got. “We always walk off stage having left everything on stage,” says Dean.
“For us, it’s about escapism,” Ellis adds. “If you go out and play a half-hour gig once a month, that to us is like a major goal. I’d like to take on the world, though I don’t know how realistic that is (laughs). Just to play a few gigs live here and there and have a couple people come up and say they liked it is just really cool in itself.”