The Temper Trap

Thu 17th Dec, 2009 in Features

The – œnext big thing’ tag gets bandied around fairly liberally these days, but for Melbourne ex-pats The Temper Trap, the phrase pretty much covers all bases.

Blog darlings as soon as Sweet Disposition hit the interwebs, they’ve since signed to three different labels across three continents and secured Jim Abbiss as producer. That’s all before one tape-reel had started rolling to capture the magic that is debut album Conditions.

The four-piece is now based in London, where they have previously said they would use to launch themselves into Europe and the US. FasterLouder catches up with lead guitarist Lorenzo Sillitto while they are on tour in the US. After one false start, the interview restarts two hours later with a very chirpy Stillitto apologising that his hotel phone was “playing silly buggers”.

“We’re in New York City,” he exclaims with boyish excitement. And why wouldn’t he be excited? The band has been in the city for four days and already played four shows at the world renowned CMJ Music Marathon, an annual week long live music extravaganza that takes over Brooklyn and Manhattan every autumn.

The band played on Jimmy Kimmel a couple of nights earlier, which the guitarist agrees was definitely a new experience. “It was pretty strange as we’d actually never played on television before so I was actually really nervous for it, but it worked out pretty well. Unfortunately it doesn’t sound as good as it did when it was recorded, but yeah, it was really exciting. I got to meet Jack Black, which was really cool.”

Conditions peaked at number 9 on the native charts and at number 26 on the UK ladder. That’s an impressive achievement from an overseas band that had only been on the musical radar for about a year. Stillitto explains that the bulk of the album came together in the six months before its release. Waiting for Abissis to arrive in Australia, the band managed to get a lot done.

“We were holed up in our little studio just practicing and coming up with different ideas and working out how to shape the songs,” he explains. “We did fairly extensive demos in our rehearsal studio which we then sent to Jim. So they were all kind of there but then he was able to make things sound ten times better than we could in our shitty little studio and that’s kind of what he bought to the table.

“I mean, there was some things which he kind of said, – œOh, you could trim this back or add a chorus here,’ but because we’d had so long waiting for him to come out to Australia, we’d already managed to do a lot of the pre-production work that we needed to do. We were a well-oiled machine when we were in the studio so we didn’t waste any time.”

The conversation then moves to the future, and Stillitto admits the band is still a long way off thinking about their follow-up record. “I think we’ve all got ideas but we’ve all been really busy and haven’t really had time to get into the studio together and spend some time to work on stuff. I think we got really good at it because we spent so long in the studio and now we haven’t been in there in so long. It might feel a little awkward, but I’m sure once we get past that, things will start flowing.”

So how has all this touring affected their live show? “We’re much better [live] players. I mean if you’re playing a show every night as we have been doing for the past year, you can’t help but get better, which is good, as it allows you to give more to the performance. You stop concentrating on what you are doing and start concentrating on how much energy you’re putting into the show. We’re a much better live outfit and the show is pretty much seamless and much better than when we left Australia.”

So is touring the key to generating revenue when record sales are so variable? Interestingly, Stillitto reveals the band sees next to nothing from tours. “We still don’t make money from tours; it’s very hard to make money from this industry in this climate. Luckily we get a lot of things taken care of for us and we get a small wage, about A$200 a week, which is enough to feed us, but we’re not millionaires. We’re still trying to get there and make everything we do more viable. So hopefully in the future we might be able to make money, but at the moment we’re still trying to pay back all our creditors.”

Lastly the topic of home comes up, and predictably Stillitto admits he’s quite looking forward to heading south for summer. “I’m really looking forward to playing Australia, getting back to some nice weather and some beaches. Though I have loved London. I’ve got some really good friends and it’s been a really great experience – something that I would never have thought was going to happen. We’ve been really lucky.”

The Temper Trap returns home to play Falls Festival, Southbound and Sunset Sounds, as well as two sideshows in Sydney and Melbourne. Then it’s on to Big Day Out.

Wed 30 Dec – Falls Festival, Lorne
Thurs 31 Dec – Falls Festival, Marion Bay
Thurs 7 Jan – Sunset Sounds, Brisbane
Fri 8 Jan – Enmore Theatre, Sydney