While he’s undoubtedly the most famous thing to come out of Kettering, there’s still a lot you don’t know about James Acaster. As many of us spent lockdown quietly re-watching our favourite Bake Off episodes and comedy specials – both instances probably including plenty of Acaster – the stand-up comedian and Off Menu podcast co-host was swapping tracks with 40 of his favourite musicians to make something special: enter Temps.
The international collective, wrangled and produced by Acaster himself, is the result of a failed mockumentary funded by Louis Theroux (more on that shortly) that instead spawned a wholly original, experimental album designed by a man who had no clue how to make one. The idea, though, was quite simple: let a load of peerless musicians – including Shamir, Quelle Chris, Deerhoof‘s John Dieterich and more – do their thing, and see what happened.
At the time of recording, Acaster was taking a break from stand-up comedy following his four-part 2018 Netflix special Repertoire and 2019 tour of Cold Lasagne 1999 Hate Myself. Following a particularly chaotic episode of The Great British Bake Off in which the comedian “started baking it, had a breakdown, bon appétit”, it was high time to let somebody else do the talking – 40 musicians, to be more specific. But it wouldn’t be an Acaster project without something a little off-kilter leading the charge: introducing Party Gator, the human-sized cuddly toy alligator Acaster has journeyed through life with, who is now taking him into this next chapter.
But more on him in a minute – for the latest in our In Conversation interview series, NME sat down with James Acaster to hear about his alligator muse, his dream Louis Theroux diss track, and how his new music venture might see his life come full circle.
Temps started as a failed mockumentary
Although Temps has now made Acaster’s wildest dreams as a music fan come true, the initial idea was to fully mock the idea that he, a tired stand-up comedian, would ever be interested in music in the first place. A mockumentary, he tells NME, had been set to follow Acaster “taking myself really seriously as a musician and being really pretentious,” calling the aforemnetioned ‘Party Gator’ toy he won at a fair as a kid “his muse”.
Acaster had already planned on taking a step back from stand-up in 2020, but filming of the mockumentary was ultimately scrapped when COVID hit. Acaster was left instead with two days’ worth of drum solos (recorded alongside jazz drummer Seb Rochford), a massive alligator cuddly toy and nothing to film. While the comedian admits that it was always “meant to be [a] silly and stupid” project, he then decided to go about digging out contacts from interviews he conducted for his 2019 book Perfect Sound Whatever. Roughly 40 emails later, and Acaster had enlisted a whole host of musicians who were willing to help him turn his abandoned film project into something else entirely.
Shamir is at the heart of everything on ‘PARTY GATOR PURGATORY’
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Temps’ debut album ‘PARTY GATOR PURGATORY’, out on May 19, features an impressive list of collaborators, but there’s one artist at the heart of it who led by example. “Shamir was the first person I worked with on it who did say to me, ‘Tell me exactly what you want and I’ll do that,’” says Acaster. “Just going, ‘Do what you like’ is not always the most freeing thing for people. It gives people so many options.”
That freedom did, however, allow several artists to provide additional synths, vocals, rap and spoken word in places Acaster never could have expected – but Shamir’s method is what set the tone. “Shamir was the first person to finish all their vocals, so I had four tracks immediately that I loved,” he recalls. “That meant that the other vocalists who were going on those songs, that was the jump-off for them, listening to Shamir’s bits.”
Acaster originally wanted to be a musician
Although many people might have first seen Acaster on either TV, on stage without instruments, or in a dark room in an Edinburgh Fringe theatre venue trying out comedy material, the 38-year-old actually cut his performing teeth playing in bands during his adolescence. Temps, then, is actually something of a creative homecoming for him.
“I was doing bands when I was a teenager into my early 20s, and I was like, ‘This is gonna be my entire life, all I’m gonna do is music,’” Acaster remembers. “When the band split up I started doing stand-up as a placeholder, and then I fell in love with stand-up and got really obsessed with that.”
Of the new challenges posed by his Temps era, he adds: “I’d never made an album from scratch that didn’t exist yet – recording it and writing it at the same time – and I’d never produced anything before, or mixed something as intensely as this one. There’s a lot of new things – if I had been doing it on my own, I don’t know how long I would have lasted.”
The comedian wants Louis Theroux to record a diss track about him
Acaster is determined to let the world know that Temps is using Louis Theroux’s money. Although the project has taken a different turn to the initially promised mockumentary, Theroux’s support remains. But has the documentarian – and one-time rapper – heard the music? Why doesn’t he feature on it as well?
“I’d rather just get a beef going with him,” Acaster replies. “If he’s doing music, I’d rather rub it in his face that we used his money to start our project, and that we tricked him and made him think I was going to do a mockumentary, and then didn’t. So if he wants to do a diss track at us, fair enough. I’ll be on the receiving end of a Louis Theroux diss track.” Your move, Theroux.
The Party Gator will live on
You can’t talk about James Acaster’s involvement in Temps without talking about the Party Gator. Think of it like the animated members of Gorillaz – muse, artist and inspiration all at once, without which the music just can’t live.
“I didn’t know that he was going to be involved in the mockumentary,” Acaster says of the original alligator toy, which has since been brought to life in the form of a custom-made full-size outfit for Acaster to wear. “It was [only] when I picked up my old drum kit [that] my friends said to me, ‘Can you pick this alligator up? We’ve been looking after it for ages’. I had to get rid of it in 2012: my girlfriend at the time was like, ‘Our flat is tiny. You can’t reasonably bring that in here. It’s the size of a person’. So I gave it to my friends, and they had it for nearly 10 years. They were like, ‘We’re now married. We would like you to take this out of our house.’”
Party Gator’s life defines the album in three stages – Party Gator RIP, Purgatory and Resurrection. It all aligns with Acaster’s very first and now present-day ambition for Temps: “It was just the idea that a comedian would take stupid stuff really seriously.” No jokes here: Party Gator is forever.
Temps’ debut album ‘PARTY GATOR PURGATORY’ will be released on May 19 via Bella Union