Halfway through No Reply, Kevin Parker walked off the stage.
A camera went with him, down the tunnel and through a door into a toilet, and the vision stayed up on the screens while he stood at the urinal with his back to the lens. He finished, walked to the B stage and played Ethereal Connection with a snippet of Glimmer.
The playing is what holds it up. Twenty-two songs from 8.45, nine of them off Deadbeat, and the new material sat level with Currents instead of being tolerated between the hits. Deadbeat Jam stretched out and earned the room. Let It Happen landed the way Let It Happen lands. Three records’ worth of material that’s difficult to combine into a cohesive live set – fuzz-pedal psych, the Currents pop, the rave stuff – went together without anyone having to pretend. In fact, at moments the rows had to just sit back and try to take it all in.
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
Elephant was the peak. It came in behind a new intro – gritty, bluesy, closer to techno than to anything from 2012 – that grabbed the riff and kept hitting it before the song proper turned up. Elephant was the lead single from Lonerism, released 26 July 2012, and the bluesiest thing on a record that otherwise disappeared into synths. The new intro argues it was a dance track all along.
Elephant was also the most restrained lighting setup of a show that otherwise was a complete visual feast.
Parker last headlined Rod Laver in October 2022 on the Slow Rush tour, when the lasers arrived late and earned the wait. This is a different animal entirely. The Deadbeat show is designed by Jonny Kingsbury and Imogene Strauss at COUR, Kingsbury handling lighting and production design, Jon Derrington directing lights on the road. Harry Boyde programmed the lasers and Jeff Owens runs them, with ER Productions supplying the laser and SFX package. Christie Lites did lighting, TAIT built the automation and scenic. None of which explains what it looks like: beams stacking into solid shapes you could read as architecture, then dropping out all at once.
Parker still makes the records on his own, writing, playing and producing the lot. Deadbeat came out a year ago to this day through Columbia, his first album for the label, recorded in Fremantle and at his Wave House studio at Injidup. He’s a bit of a renaissance man, to the point he even sells hardware now too: Orchid, the chord-generating synth from his company Telepathic Instruments.
But while he’s gone viral speaking about the ‘Tame Impala is just one guy’ meme this week, in truth, a Tame Imapala live show takes six people.
Dominic Simper and James Ireland on guitar and synth, Jay Watson on synth, guitar and vocals, Cam Avery on bass, Julien Barbagallo on drums, Parker out front on guitar and vocals. Watson and Ireland are both in Pond, which helps you understand Parker’s consistent returns to psychedelia throughout every live set, regardless of how electronic his career becomes.
Parker spent the night in a big 90s cardigan, trackies and sneakers, under the shaggy mop he’s had since Innerspeaker. The tour is called Deadbeat and he dressed for it.
The run finishes at Rod Laver on 17 October.
