122. Tame Impala

Alexandra Palace

13 February 2016

I keep telling myself that the last time I schlepped up to Ally Pally for a gig would be the last time, a final, noble stand against the tyranny of its location and the sheer Kafkaesque misery of the experience. And yet, like some tragic figure in a Greek myth doomed to repeat the same mistake for all eternity, here I am again, trudging towards Muswell Hill’s cultural wasteland, where the nearest thing to a sign of life is the lukewarm chicken lurking in the nuggets from the Morley’s at the bottom of the hill.

It’s almost poetic that this building, once a temporary refuge for displaced Belgians during WWII, is now a kind of halfway house for bands in career transition. Those who’ve graduated from Brixton Academy but lack the pulling power to fill Wembley Arena end up here, trapped in this netherworld. Inside, the faux festival food court assaults the senses: pulled pork being spooned into buns under the weak orange glare of heat lamps, the air thick with the oily despair of mass catering. Given the place has already burned down once, the health-and-safety brigade now patrol it with all the charm of North Korean airport security, ready to bark at anyone who so much as stands near the wrong bin. Add in the nonsensical crowd-control measures clearly invented by a bored lifer at Haringey Council, and you’ve got yourself a carnival-themed purgatory where even the skinny fries look like they’ve been reheated enough times to qualify for a pension.

Yet, here we are, drawn back as if by some masochistic gravitational pull. It’s the same phenomenon that explains childbirth: if you truly remembered the pain, you’d never do it again. Your brain blocks it out just long enough for you to make the same mistake twice. By the time we’ve climbed halfway up the hill from the nearest tube station, the distant aroma of stale beer and charred tofu kicks my sensory memory back into gear, and I’m cursing myself all over again.

The lure tonight is Tame Impala, or rather, Kevin Parker, since the rest of the “band” are essentially high-functioning session hostages in his meticulously crafted psych-pop universe. The Australian polymath is notorious for locking himself away in his musical laboratory, tinkering with his songs like a deranged chemist until they’re distilled into something precise, shimmering, and borderline obsessive-compulsive. Then, once every few years, he assembles a live band to recreate them exactly as they sound on record. No liberties. No risks. You get the feeling these poor sods were trained SAS-style, Parker doling out food only if they nailed the minor eighth exactly as he heard it in his head.

And to be fair, they’re tight. Scary tight. The sort of playing where you start scanning the stage for signs of a cry for help spelled out in coiled guitar cables. Song after song is executed with surgical precision, until a rare moment of spontaneity breaks through. Someone in the crowd waves a sign demanding “Alter Ego”, and instead of the usual “We don’t do requests” shrug, Parker instructs the band to “play some celebration music.” They promptly drop into an impromptu cover of Beck’s “Where It’s At”, and for a fleeting moment the stage feels human.

There’s the inevitable cheer when the opening bars of “Elephant” thunder in, fuzzed-out and stomping, and later a sprawling, ten-minute reimagining of “Apocalypse Dreams” that blooms from a deep-cut Lonerism track into a full-blown prog-rock epic. But outside those moments, it’s all clockwork precision and immaculate replication.

Yes, the musicianship is impeccable. Yes, the sound is crystalline. But you don’t walk out of Ally Pally grinning from ear to ear, you walk out questioning why you spent the night trudging to the far edge of Narnia to hear something you could’ve recreated at home with a good stereo, a cup of tea, and no risk of overpriced pulled pork.

If this was meant to be a transcendent psychedelic voyage, then I fear the ship never left port. Instead, we stayed moored to the dock, sipping Camden Hells, and wondering how long before we break our vows and climb that hill again.