On Temps’ PARTY GATOR PURGATORY, James Acaster Becomes the DJ of His Dreams

I discovered James Acaster’s stand-up comedy many moons ago—sometime pre-pandemic—on Netflix, when he released the four-part serial Repertoire on the streaming titan. Two years later, his most-recent special Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 cemented him as a household name. Around that time, he wound up on The Great British Bake Off and became a meme that still echoes across social media in 2023. But the truth is, Acaster is one of the world’s greatest comedians, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the industry’s very best—and often surpassing them. His delivery is gut-busting; his ability to create some of the cleverest punchlines is one-in-a-million.

But perhaps that is where what you know about Acaster ends. I, myself, was shocked to learn that the English humorist was not only a musican, but that he was putting out a record this year. In his younger days, Acaster played in bands that presented themselves as everything from Limp Bizkit kinfolk to Beach Boys wannabes. He also taught drums to young people, though many of his pupils didn’t engage with the craft in any real, affectionate ways. A few years ago, Acaster listened to every album from 2016 and wrote a book on how it was the greatest year ever for music at-large. On the BBC, he hosted his own podcast: James Acaster’s Perfect Sounds.

PARTY GATOR PURGATORY, which Acaster is releasing under the stage name Temps, arrives to us this week as an experimental, genre-bending, 10-track odyssey dedicated to the legacy and heroics of a party gator toy he won at a fair when he was seven years old. A project born from the ashes of a now-canned I’m Still Here-style mockumentary, Acaster dons a gator suit to keep the aesthetics moving; he even became gravely ill while filming music videos for the sake of upholding the bit and his high-brow art of long-winded wit. Across PARTY GATOR PURGATORY, Acaster plays drums while his guiding lights sing and perform alongside his percussion arrangements.

Calling on everyone from NNAMDÏ to Open Mike Eagle to Shamir to Joana Gomilla to Deerhoof’s John Dieterich, Acaster has formed a superteam of inquisitive wordsmiths and cosmic shredders. He’s become the coolest DJ in the world, and no song on the album arrives the same—which elevates the mythology around the project altogether. Many months have passed since Acaster completed PARTY GATOR PURGATORY, and he still doesn’t know how so many musicians he adores, respects and pulls influence from wound up on his own project—one that is set to propel him even further into his return to music, drumming and songwriting.

Earlier this spring, I sat down with Acaster over Zoom. We went deep into how he got to work with his hero Seb Rochford, the origins and production behind PARTY GATOR PURGATORY and how the album will stack up against the titanic, generational projects from 2016. Read our conversation below.

Paste: I’m truly fascinated by this project, because it’s not just “Oh, James Acaster the comedian is making music.” No, you’ve assembled this huge team of incredible musicians. Talk to me about how that came to be.

James Acaster: It was a gradual thing, so it wasn’t the idea from the outset. I had recorded a bunch of drums for, what was going to be, a mockumentary that then got axed because of the pandemic and the lockdowns. Previous to that, I had interviewed loads of musicians for a book I’d written about music and a podcast that I’d done about music. So, I just found myself in lockdown with hours of drums, and I decided to start sending them to these musicians and seeing if anyone wanted to add anything to them. It wasn’t an idea, at the time, that this would be a project or this would be an album. It was just, “Let’s pass the time while we’re locked down.” And creative people can find something to keep their brains busy.

The more that people sent back to me, the more it became like, “Oh, this feels like an actual project.” Because, I didn’t feel comfortable contacting someone and going, “Okay, I’ve now got 10 songs. Can you guest on 10 songs?” So it would become like, “Okay, let’s see how much each person wants to do and how many songs they want to contribute.” And so, this becomes more and more people that are on it and you’re selecting them very carefully and making it people who would gel well together.

But then, as a music fan and music geek, it’s just the dream. It’s my fantasy football, but it’s real, and I get to go, “This person with this person” and “Let’s put this puzzle together.” It just became something all on its own, it felt like.

So with every track, it’s your drum work beneath everyone else’s contributions?

Yeah, so the drums on each song are me and Seb Rochford, but we’re both playing. I recorded drums for two days, improvising, not to a click track, with drums that were out of tune. And then, I sat down with my engineer, Chris Hamilton, and we listened to those hours and hours of drums and picked out bits that we liked and turned them into drum loops. We made loops out of my bits, then Seb came in for another two days and recorded over the drum loops. So we’ve got however many it was at the time, 20 drum loops, that we like—it was actually more than that—and we would just play it and [Seb] would improvise along to it for 10 minutes.

And then we’d stop, have a break, put the next one on and he’d improvise on that for 10 minutes. We’d do it that way with the idea of “We’ll pick out loops from his bits as well, or use the whole of his bit.” And what that meant was that, for each song, I could at least do two sections. I can at least do my drum loop bit and then Seb’s drum loop bit and then back to mine. And they will be in the same timing, because he’s playing to me. Or, sometimes, it’s my drum loop for the whole song and Seb’s improvisations progressing for the whole song. And, sometimes, it’s cutting back and forth between my drum loop and then Seb’s improvising for a while.

It gave us loads more options, when it came to how to structure the drums on the album. And then Adam Betts, who makes music under Colossal Squid, provided additional drums. There was some bits where I was like, “Actually, I feel like I now want the drums to do this, now that we’ve got guitar, bass, keys, whatever on it. I now feel like the drums should do this at this point, but I haven’t got that. And, actually, I don’t want to move backwards and go back in the studio and record those drums or ask Seb to do it. We’ve done our bit. It has to be someone new.” And I felt like it should be someone new. Adam is amazing and was able to provide a completely different voice, in terms of drums for those sections as well.

And Seb was going to overdub the drums for the mockumentary, too, right?

So, the idea was, I wasn’t trying to play badly for the mockumentary. I was genuinely trying to play as good as I could. But, knwoig that that would be funny, because I was so naturally rusty and the drum kit was so out of tune, the idea was that I would listen back to it in-character and go “These are too sloppy, man, I can’t put this out” and then contact one of the best jazz drummers in the world and get him to play over them to make them sound good. And what that meant was that I went into lockdown with hours of me and Seb Rochford drumming together, which, you know, if you told me that when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t have believed it would ever happen. It’s a dream come true.

At what point did this project go from collaborating with these awesome musicians over email to you realizing, like, “I think we can put a record of 10 tracks together and put it out on a label”?

There was a point, quite early on, actually, where I wasn’t thinking about a label straight away and I was going to self-release it. Joana Gomila and Laia Vallès, I sent them the drums and they improvised for a week on synths and vocals. And they sent it back to me and I cut up what they did and made the skeletons of songs. And then I sent them to John Dieterich of Deerhoof and he put on bass, guitar and keys and they became these fully fleshed-out instrumentals. At that point, that’s when I started to think of it as, “These sound like proper songs now.” There were about seven of them at that point, and I was like, “Oh, I could release this if I get some vocalists on it.” And then, quite soon after that, I was like, “Well, if I’m gonna release this, is there anything that I think is missing or that I want on there?”

And there were three drum tracks that Joana and Laia hadn’t played to that I really wished were on the album. I’d listened to them so much as just drums that I liked them as just drums. So I thought, “I’m gonna send these drum tracks, with nothing else on them, to vocalists and see if we can do some tracks that are just drums and vocals.” And then that became like, “Okay, that’s a 10-track album, and I’ll space those three evenly throughout so that we have those punctuation points.” I knew what the concept would be, because I’d already improvised a concept for the mockumentary. So quite quickly, after John had done his stuff, it felt like, “Oh, now I’ve got ideas for an album and now we can put this out.”

I’m personally really in love with the work that Shamir, NNAMDÏ, and Open Mike Eagle do. Especially NNAMDÏ. He’s one of my favorite working musicians. How did you discover these artists? Did you seek them out for the collective, or did you know them from your podcast?

I was a fan of all of them beforehand. Like, massive fan. Every musician on this album has released an album which I consider to be one of my favorite albums. It just feels nuts. The whole thing feels crazy to me, that I’ve managed to work with them, that I’ve managed to get them to work with each as well—not that they’re difficult to work with, but they’re people who I would love to hear on a track together and it actually happened. Yeah, I was a fan of all of them first and then approached them. Some of them I’d already approached for the book and the podcast and recorded interviews with them. But NNAMDÏ, I’d written about him but not met him, not been in contact, not interviewed him. But I was able to get his contact details and be like: “I’m doing this project and I would love you on it.” And then, somehow, every single first choice I had for this album said yes. I didn’t ever have to go down to my second choice. Everyone you hear on the project, they were first choice for that section.

I’m interested in the mockumentary-style TV show you and Louis Theroux were going to make that got shelved. Did the pilot episode ever get finished?

No, it’s just this 10-minute taster. We’ve turned the footage of that into a music video that will come out on the same day that the album is released. We’ve got a song, “partygatorR.I.P.,” that we’ve made the music video for out of the discarded mockumentary footage. But, no, never. It never got finished. It never moved on. We want to do something in the future, but it’s gonna have to be a different idea now—because, this one, I’ve kind of made a reality by mistake.

I think it would have been really great watching you try to stop being a comedian and become a musician. That would have been funny because a lot of folks have tried to do similar styles of things. When I first heard about it, I thought about that Joaquin Phoenix project, I’m Still Here, where he quit being an actor to become a rapper. Most folks know you as a stand-up comic or, if they’re not familiar with your comedy, they probably know you from the Great British Bake Off meme that will never die. Have you always wanted to make a pivot towards music like this, in a similar vein as the version of yourself in the mockumentary?

Before I did comedy, all I wanted to do was be in a band and play drums. And that’s all I did do until I was 22, 23. When I started stand-up comedy, I really fell in love with it, to the degree where I couldn’t imagine doing music again. I just assumed I never would do it, even though it had been a dream of mine since I was seven—specifically, to make an album. That had been the thing I was really engaged with with music, more than seeing it live or anything like that. That’s all I wanted to do from the age of seven and then, because I went into comedy, I think it was easier to just put that out of my head and not think of it.

It was really a nice surprise for me to find a way back to that quite organically, to have this period of my life in 2017 where I started engaging with current music again for the first time since becoming a comic. I got exhilarated and excited by the amount of innovative stuff that was being released on a daily basis and found it extremely energizing to know that the modern world wasn’t as drab as I thought it was.

And then, though that, music became a part of my everyday language again—talking to people about it and talking to musicians and interviewing people. At the start of 2020, my parents said, “You need to pick up your drum kit from the house. It’s been over 10 years, we don’t want it here anymore.” I was already gonna take 2020 off from comedy, so I naturally thought: “If I’m picking up the drum kit, maybe I could mess around with it and record stuff and see where it goes.” And then I got asked if I had any documentary ideas, so I said, “Well, I’m gonna be picking up my drum kit. Maybe we can make a mockumentary about me sidestepping into music.” And maybe, subconsciously, when I was saying that, that was what I wanted to do. But I hadn’t acknowledged it to myself yet. Then, as I started doing it, it felt like, “Oh, yeah, this is what I should be doing. This is definitely the project I should be working on at the minute.”

Instantly reconnecting with something that I’d been really missing, without knowing it, I realized how much I missed working on songs and recording songs. That was what I enjoyed most about being in bands, writing songs and recording songs. This way, I was able to do those things simultaneously—literally in tandem—at the same time. Now that we’ve done it, I would have hated to have not done that and not had that experience and not found my way back to it.

This record plays a lot with different sounds. There’s pop, jazz, hip-hop. I’m curious about what music you were making when you were playing in those bands.

I started off, when I was 15, in a nü-metal band that had a Joe Satriani-esque guitarist in it. You’re in school, it’s just who else plays music. That’s our band; he’s intent on doing solos, so I guess that’s going in. And, looking back, I think that was actually the best part of that teenage band, that we’d be playing these very typical nu-metal songs and then, suddenly, Joe Satriani was in the building doing this solo and then you’d go back into this nü-metal song.

Then I was in a hardcore band—very short, hardcore punk songs; listening to a lot of Minor Threat and Nerve Agents. And we sounded very much like that gothic side of hardcore. Maybe then, a post-hardcore band. Obviously, that’s the next natural evolution. You discover time signatures and melody, so you start writing those kinds of songs, listening to At the Drive-In all time.

And then, a two piece band. The rule was we wouldn’t use distortion, because every band we’d been in before had been playing guitar that had distortion for the chorus. So we were trying to not use distortion. That was the only real rule, but then it ended up with this thing where the other guy was listening to the Beach Boys all the time. So we wanted to sing like the Beach Boys and we tried to, just the two of us, and we failed. We were still heavily into all the time-changes we’d been doing in the post-hardcore band, so it was a lot of that and playing a little bit jazzy, but also wanting to have quite a lot of hooks present. I was listening to a lot of Biffy Clyro at the time, so I think that fed into it as well. It was a very avant-garde, weird band. That was just before I started stand-up and we recorded all of those songs. When we knew we was splitting up, we spent a month in the studio, recording all the songs.

And you used to teach drums to kids, right?

Yeah, I think after a few years I’d had about 90 students. Not consistently or all the time; some of them would do two lessons and quit, some of them would do years. All different ages, and most of them would not practice in-between drum lessons. I probably had about three students out of the 90 who would practice in-between lessons. I know that one of them is now a police officer, so that was a waste of time. And one of them was a little kid who was really sweet, but I don’t think she wanted to be a drummer. She was just a very good kid, so if she was told to practice she would do it. One kid was better than I ever was and he was probably nine years old. He would go away and practice everything I told him to practice and then find more stuff to practice and bring that back. He was always smiling when he was playing the drums, a huge smile. I really don’t know what he’s up to now, but I really hope he’s still doing something with it—because it was a proper “Oh, shit, you’re made for this.” I hope that he is still playing drums.

Tell me about the party gator that inspired the album, because I know that he is no longer with us. The party gator costume you’ve been sporting is a replica, yes?

I won this party gator toy at a fair when I was seven. I’d had him in the house growing up. My parents hated him, which meant that, when I moved to London, they were like, “You have to take that with you or we’re gonna throw it out.” So I took it with me to London, it went from flat-to-flat with me, houseshare-to-houseshare, until it got to the point where I was going to move in with my girlfriend at the time and she was like: “There’s no way that’s coming into our flat. The flat is tiny, you can’t bring that, it’s the size of a person.” So I found some friends back home who would take care of it for me. And it just so happened that, at the same time my parents were like “You need to pick up this drum kit,” my friends were like “You need to pick up this party gator.”

When I was doing the mockumentary, I basically improvised it deliberately into the storyline that “I’m getting the drum kit back, but I need to get this party gator—because it’s going to be the inspiration behind the whole album,” even though I had no idea what it would ever turn into. I just thought that would be funny, to have my character in the mockumentary obsessed with his child toy and needed it to be in the studio with him. So, when we were improvising for it, I was playing on my drums opposite this party gator that I put on this chair and Seb did the same when he came in.

For the cameras, I was making up this narrative with the party gator because I’d had it, I had to give it away and now we’re reunited. The album was gonna be in three sections: It’s “partygatorR.I.P.,” “partygatorpurgatory” and “partygatorresurrection.” That reperesnets the three life stages of the party gator. I was just improvising and trying to sound dumb and silly—but then, when you find yourself actually making an album and it’s real, you go: “Well, let’s draw from the actual creative starting point that we already have here, which is this.”

Whenever vocalists asked me what they were going to sing about, I would say: “Okay, this ⅓ of the album is about death, this ⅓ is about purgatory and this ⅓ is about resurrection. And they then interpreted that in their own personal way that wasn’t anything to do with a cartoon alligator. It’s them interpreting those themes themselves.

Did you get to see any of their reactions when they realized that these really deep, meaningful songs that they had been making were also unintentionally about the party gator?

I was upfront with them about it and they weren’t surprised, because they were doing an album with a comedian. And while it’s not a comedy album, it’s not trying to run away from who I am, either. So they, I think, expected that, when you’re going to do an album with a comic and they go, “Okay, I’ve got his party gator character and the themes of the album are based on this, but don’t worry, you don’t have to write about the party gator. These are just the themes.” They were all just like, “Oh, yeah, cool, fine.” They’re all open to stuff like that in their work, as well. NNAMDÏ, Yoni Wolf, Quelle [Chris], they all have elements of stuff that shouldn’t be taken seriously running in tandem with stuff that is extremely personal throughout all of their project. I was approaching the right people for that kind of concept. None of them are chin-stroking musicians who would turn their nose up at that.

If you had to do it over again, would you still risk getting heat stroke and labrunthitis for the sake of making music videos in a full gator suit?

I probably would, yeah. I mean, since then, we’ve recorded another video in the gator suit and I’ve fucked my ankle up. It still hurts now, as I’m talking to you, so it’s an ongoing thing. I think it was worth it, to make as many music videos as we have. We’re now on course to have a music video for every song on the album, and that feels very cool and fun. But it was not fun having heat stroke and it was not fun having labrunthitis. They were on separate occasions, as well. It was for the same video, but went for two different days that were actually a year apart. One year I got heat stroke and then the next year I got labrunthitis, which was very bad for a week. I felt relieved and blessed that it was just a week, because I thought it might be for the rest of my fucking life.

I was revisiting the “no,no” video, and someone had commented that 2016 is no longer the greatest year of all time for music. Where does PARTY GATOR PURGATORY rank among the heavyweight albums released in 2016 for you?

Well, it’s so hard because, obviously, the heavyweights of that year are deeply personal albums to me. But now, [PARTY GATOR PURGATORY] is a deeply personal album to me that will fit in a space that very few things do, beause it’s not only an album I was involved in; it’s an album where all of the things on it that are incredible to me are done by other people. I still dont’ know how it was made. I know what I did, but I don’t know how they wrote any of their parts. I can’t fathom it, so it still holds that magic to me of an album written by somebody else and made by somebody else. It’s such a unique experience, but I certainly wouldn’t be releasing it and putting it out into the world if I didn’t think it could go toe-to-toe with the heavyweights of 2016.

For me, I only want to put something out there if it has the potential to be someone’s favorite album. And I feel that way about this. When it connects with the right people, I think it’s really going to connect. And I’m excited about that. It’s nice to be able to say that with no real arrogance because, again, I don’t really know how it happened. I just know that the musicians on it are my favorite musicians in the world. They’re all my heroes, and I’m so grateful to them for giving their time and doing this. Let’s see if we can make this the best year for music of all-time. There’s already been some pretty brilliant albums.

I think PARTY GATOR PURGATORY can go 15 rounds with Blonde.

There’s not a “Facebook Story” track on this album, so we’ve got that going for us.

PARTY GATOR PURGATORY arrives May 19 via Bella Union.