Psych Pop has been enjoying a healthy resurgence. The loudest shots from the latest wave were fired by Tame Impala when they released Innerspeaker in 2010, soon becoming one of the biggest indie acts in the world. Whether due to interstellar grokking or flattering imitation, an army of like-minded bands unleashed a Technicolor explosion on an accepting world shortly thereafter. Things were different this time around due to how international it had become, owing to a connection of a non-cosmic kind: The Internet. This kicked scenes into gear, yielding bands like Electric Eye (Norway), Boogarins (Brasil), Oracles (Germany), and The Wands (Denmark). But the breakout success of 2014 was unquestionably Temples, who started the year by winning over fans at SXSW, backed by the strength of a self-recorded single, "Shelter Song." They would perform that same song on the The Ellen DeGeneres Show and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon six months later, ending the year on many critics' "best of" lists. Quite a ride for a band from Kettering, England — far from the music meccas of London, Liverpool, and Manchester — that was barely over a year old. We found out how James Bagshaw and Tom Warmsley started it all in a spare bedroom, with some big ideas and consumer-grade gear.
How long have you known each other?
James: We were in rival bands growing up, then in a previous band together [The Moons], but we didn't do any writing or production together. Then we each got into what the other was listening to, and I guess that's how Temples formed. We had similar tastes.
Thomas: In our previous band, ideas really started to develop and James started taking it upon himself to record. That's where it started, really. He learned to record so he could record his own music.
What were the common bands that brought you together?
J: The Byrds, probably...
T: Sixties pop records, and great producers as well. Not only an admiration for songs, but also an interest in how people achieved certain sounds.
What are some of your production influences?
T: As with many people, The Beatles and their productions were my first passion. Some truly groundbreaking sounds were created in the studio the later you go into their catalog. From there it was sounds from other records. Maybe not one album, in particular, but, "Oh, that guitar sound is great," or the drum sound on the intro of some other record is incredible.
Any that stand out?
T: That Neil Young song, "Expecting to Fly." Jack Nitzsche's production on it sounds like another level. The album [Buffalo Springfield Again] is a bit of an oddball anyway, because I think they were breaking up in the process of recording it. I guess they weren't meant to be together for too many years. But that song in particular is a different world unto itself. It wasn't just the four of them in the room. There is an atmosphere and a mood with it.
J: There is so much space in it as well. For a track to sound so big, but still have space, is really the hardest thing. Maybe on the next record we can strive for that.
Something to aspire to.
T: I like The Byrds — the sound of the 12-string guitars, how they really command every song that has one in it, and how it really jumps out at you. The harmony vocals are really inspiring.
When you sat down to do the first Temples recordings, did you write as a partnership?
J: No, we individually had ideas. It started with a song that had a very particular drum sound. The melody and chorus changed; a few things were taken out and added, but finding that initial drum sound was like finding the key to the whole record, even though we kind of stumbled across it. When we actually started working on proper tracks, like "Keep in the Dark" and "Jewel of Mine Eye," we had a backbone of how we wanted the record to sound like already. There are no demos of any of these tracks. They all grew from that, the way they were intended.
How did you mic the drums?
J: Glyn Johns' style. It's very simple. I didn't close mic anything, other than the kick drum.
What mics did you use?
J: Two ribbon mics from Thomann; the German company. They're not a matched pair, but I matched them with an EQ as close as I could. I figured that it didn't really matter because we're not getting a true stereo image of the kit, so it didn't have to be totally balanced. The kick drum mic is a fake [AKG] D 112. That was all we could afford.
Did you add in a room mic?
J: Yeah. A Reslo ribbon; mono and smashed.
Did you decide to do the record yourselves out of economy, or was it more of a creative control decision?
J: Our arrogance! No. I think if we didn't get the sounds that we wanted, we would have been disappointed. For so many years both of us would go into this massive studio, and it's like, "Oh my god, this is amazing." But what happens is that you come out with something that never sounds the way you want. It was that disappointment of always being let down by studios. You walk in and there are racks and a Neve console, but people lose touch. No one has an idea of how to make something sound original. You do get a great drum sound, but so did every other band that recorded there that year. The only difference is probably reverb.
There are go-to compressors and settings. Everyone [plays it] safe. I think we were worried about that. At the time, we weren't thinking about music being our career, although we would have loved it. We weren't thinking we'd get signed and go gig. It was two of us writing songs at home. But we loved the idea of creating something and almost tricking people into thinking, "Where the hell did this come from?" People hear the obvious '60s influence. The Motown drums are the best drum sound ever, so that was an influence. But we also wanted it to sound almost alien to other current records.
What did you use to record it?
J: A Mac running [Apple] Logic.
What A to D converters did you use?
J: I used two. Halfway through the record we needed to upgrade to have more inputs. At the start, it was a Focusrite Saffire 6, but it only had two inputs and four outputs. Now we use an ART TubeFire, which is a discontinued model that you can't find any bloody information about. It was hard to get the drivers. It sounds good, though. Not like Apogee good; but we didn't need that, because we weren't doing a high-fidelity pop album.
Did you use any outboard gear?
J: Bits and bobs. We used a WEM Tape Echo.
The Watkins Copicat?
J: Yeah. It's a silver top, exposed tape, with a red leather interior — a '70s one. That and a spring reverb unit with a three-band EQ that I built out of parts a few years ago, before Temples. It works really nice. Even with the reverb off, it's a pretty nasty EQ — quite cool! Then a 2-track reel-to-reel, and a 4-track Tascam or Fostex — I can't remember which. They weren't actually used on the record, but a lot of ideas came from playing around with what you can do with tape.
Manual flanging, and things along those lines?
J: There's a bit of that, but also the Les Paul style, where it's slowed down and sped up. We tried to do the Joe Meek trick, where you slow down a piano half speed and make it sound like a harp, but I think we would have needed Geoff Goddard [Meek's pianist] to play it to get it right. There are so many notes to play, even at a slow speed.
T: I remember on "Sand Dance," putting the drums through the reel-to-reel and half speeding it to get some kind of crunching on the loop.
You've been on tour forever. Have you picked up anything you're looking forward to using on the next record?
T: A British made mic pre, from 1960. It doesn't have a name, but it's a two-rack unit with a big VU meter and four massive knobs. I recently got that, and it's the best sounding preamp I think I've ever heard. I don't use any condenser mics, but a ribbon mic it makes you sound like Nat King Cole or something. It's brilliant. It's velvety smooth. I got a 1952 Selmer Clavioline in museum condition, which we did get to use on the record, just on the riff of "Golden Throne." There's something so simple about the Clavioline. It's the best monophonic synth sound. It can be anything you want — a violin or whatever. I reckon we should utilize that a bit more on the next record. They haven't been used much lately, apart from The White Stripes' Icky Thump. Respect to Jack White for bringing that back.
Was it tough to record in the environment you were in? You were tracking and mixing in your house, right?
T: Yeah, exactly. It was the perfect environment in some ways, because it wasn't a professional studio. Not even acoustically treated. Obviously, acoustic treatment when recording vocals is important because you don't want too much of the room. You've got to have a reflection filter to eliminate that short, annoying slapback. In a way I think [a treated room] almost doesn't matter. If you're used to the sound of records you love, and how they sound in that room, then you know which frequencies are false. It was a case of tailoring things slightly with the scoops on the back of the monitors, the low shelf / high shelf [adjustments]; but we also got used to the sound of the room. At one point I moved into my bedroom for some tracking and moved the monitors in there to make more space. But I couldn't adjust to the sound of that. Everything sounded totally different. The whole record needed to be done in the same space; certainly from a production point of view, as far as getting the sounds right and for general mixing. I guess only two of the mixes went on the album, because we got to the point where we couldn't get enough headroom for the tracks we had. That's when we got Claudius [Mittendorfer] to mix.
Which of the two that you mixed at home made it to the record?
T: The first and the last track ["Shelter Song" and "Test of Time"], so it's bookended.
They sound great. When you gave the first songs to Heavenly [Recordings, Temples' label], did they come knocking?
T: All we did was record five songs in the space of about two weeks and put them up online, and on YouTube, with an album cover we created. We had this package for people to listen to, and we hoped they'd say, "Oh, where's this coming from?" Heavenly liked them and immediately asked us if we'd like to put it out as a single, untouched from how we'd recorded it.
Did they recommend Claudius to mix, or did you have a connection already?
J: I think our manager had worked with him. At the time, we were not open to the idea. We wanted it to sound better, but we knew that without having really high-quality preamps and compressors, we were stuck. The computer was crashing all the time because it didn't have enough RAM so we had to bounce and use really destructive mixing. We couldn't edit it once we'd exported it with software compression. It got to the point where we had like 60 tracks to mix on one song, and we couldn't get it to jump enough. We sent him the stems of "Colours to Life," and he mixed it. I remember being on tour and we were in the catering room. I gave it the first listen with crappy iPod headphones, and it took my head off. It was brilliant. I had been against the idea, but the chorus smacked me around the face. It was exactly what we wanted it to do. He really got it to jump. That started a great relationship. He came to our show the other day, and he's a great friend of ours now.
It's true. When you get a person who knows what they're doing and who understands what you're doing, it all comes together. There's a reason they get paid to do this.
J: Well, he didn't freak out about the drum track, which, except for overdubs, was a mixed stereo track and not separate files. I said, "Look, they're the right level. So as long as everything sits around that, it's good." He didn't have the option to really fuck with it. But he wouldn't have anyway because he respected the production style, as well as the lo-fi meets hi-fi world we were trying to create.
Did you have any mixing background, or did you take a stab at it and see what happened?
T: I used my ears. I think you can understand a lot from listening to records. How stuff is separated, equalization, compression, whether it's a mono reverb or a stereo reverb, or a slapback versus a long, flowing echo. You can listen to it on another level and pull parts of it out. I've found that it's always been the drums that have been the struggle in previous bands. The drums always sounded bad, never like they did in the room; once you bring the room mic up, it sounded like shit. Sun Structures all fell into place, I think, because of how the drums were. The tracks were probably easier to mix because they had such a raw quality. You could get away with things being a bit sketchy and not polished. We weren't EQing syllables or anything.
Has it been difficult to write on the road?
J: It's hard, because of the way the band started. We had time to write at home, within our own environments. A few ideas have been written on the road and taken to the studio briefly, but it's hard to get the needed breathing space when you're in live mode. You view the songs in a different way, and I think we write in a different way.
T: We've grown up as a band where playing live and making records are very separate things, I guess. It's weird to think of doing it the other way around, where we play a song in a rehearsal room and eventually record it.
It's a very modern development, with what's now available to musicians.
T: Yeah, for us it's always been the other way around of having the definitive article of a song and then doing what we want with it live. That process does make it hard to develop ideas while we've been touring though.
You've had to figure out how to take these lush songs that you've made and present them in a live way.
T: Probably the biggest challenge for us is making an executive decision of what bits of a song are integral that we want to keep for the live performance, and which are fluid enough to change. Working on that has been a new experience for us. I feel like we realize completely now what we want to do live. For most of the summer, we've been enjoying getting our live music to that level. But yeah, it's a huge challenge. You get so attached to what you've recorded and how it sounds on the record. I think we've finally got the mix just about right, between what to keep and what to let go.
It makes things a little easier with all of the effects and backing track options available now, assuming you want to use them. But perhaps you don't want to depend on that too much?
J: We have an [Roland] SPD-S [sampling percussion pad] with samples that are integral parts of the song, like a four bar loop of gated drums that we'll bring in at certain points. It means being constrained to a click on some songs, but it works because some songs pull you in; not in a conventional rock and roll way, but in a mechanical, Kraftwerk way. Snipping tympani samples from tracks of the record and taking them out live is a great thing. I guess it's like what people did with the Mellotron. They'd write these great arrangements and then realize it would cost a fortune to take an orchestra out on the road.
Will you continue to record at home? Are you going to change your studio space at all, now that you're doing this for a living?
J: Sun Structures was recorded at my parent's house. We'll need a new space for the new album. But yes, we'll do it ourselves. Maybe at home, but we're thinking about hiring a space for two months, setting up everything, and getting immersed in it. We won't have to worry about neighbors.
Will you be writing it as a band, or will the two of you start together and bring the others in later?
J: The idea is for all four of us to be involved. I think we're going to try to write individually first, then come together and each present what we have. Then we can decide together on what's great and what's shit, openly and honestly with each other. I think if we sat in a room and jammed, we wouldn't write good songs. We're all far too songwriter-minded. We're not a jam band.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
J: Can Neumann give us a mic please?
Temples are at templestheband.com
Alex Maiolo is at alexmaiolo@tapeop.com
