Then he announced the imminent arrival of Tame Impala’s third album by releasing Let It Happen, a song that sounded almost nothing like their last two albums. First, he co-wrote and lent his voice to three tracks on Mark Ronson’s Uptown Special album, in the process causing a degree of uproar among the let’s get a petition up about Kanye West section of Tame Impala’s fanbase. Thus far, he seems to have spent 2015 moving even further off-piste. It served notice that Parker wasn’t interested in revivalism or sticking to a script. The result was a very 21st-century album. Lonerism, in 2012, wasn’t above dropping the odd reference to the Beatles or the Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, but the songs came draped in modern electronics and slathered in distortion – not the warm, familiar fuzz of overdriven amps, but an alien, digital noise, the sound of modern machines going wrong. Of all the music by the current crop of psychedelically inclined artists, Tame Impala’s albums have been the least slavishly indebted to the 60s. It’s a point that Kevin Parker seems to implicitly understand. One reason those albums are great is because they were made without an instruction manual: they were the work of people crashing through the usual boundaries and venturing into the unknown.
You can see why – who wouldn’t be seduced by the sound of rock music at its most inventive? – but the big problem with a lot of latterday psychedelia is its tendency to treat Revolver or Forever Changes or The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as set texts, musical instruction manuals to be followed to the letter, which rather misses the point. At any point since the early 80s, you could expect to find someone doing something audibly in thrall to the soundtrack of the summer of love: from Temples to Toy, there’s certainly a lot of it about at the moment. There’s another volume to be written about psychedelia’s curious afterlife: the fact that a genre assumed to be a fad, inexorably linked with a moment in time and a fleeting burst of druggy utopianism, turned out to be anything but. But it ends around 1971, as psychedelia calcified into prog and the pop artists who’d sung of their minds growing up to the sky on Top of the Pops found themselves back on the cabaret circuit. The work of the academic Rob Chapman, it is a fantastic, exhaustive history of the genre: comprehensive but gripping, packed with eye-opening period detail and with a brilliant analysis of everything from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the oeuvre of the Crocheted Doughnut Ring. In a few weeks’ time, the book Psychedelia and Other Colours is due to be published.
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