The Peep Tempel

Scott’s voice is the perfect instrument for these stories. Half Mark E. Smith and half Mark Lanegan, he can switch from aggressive and loud to bluesy and gravel-toned. “We try and build characters so the music’s a theme or a soundtrack to a certain character’s life and build a character to that,” he says. “When we did the first record, where we rehearsed was across the road from a halfway house and we’d be looking out the window all day and there’d be some pretty desperate situations going on. It really rubbed off on the music and had that real dirgey, desperate feel to it, and we continue that with this record. The themes aren’t very nice, I guess.”

One character in particular has returned in several Peep Tempel songs. After being introduced on their first album in ‘Mister Lester Moore’, he came back on their EP Modern Professional in ‘The Incarceration Of Lester Moore’. In Tales his saga comes to an oddly fitting end with ‘The Opera Of Lester Moore’, a surprisingly proggy conclusion to the album, like something on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. “Once we did the record and we were mixing it I just remember sitting there thinking, and I actually said to the other guys, ‘Are we really putting this on the album? Is this really happening?’ It’s like a rock opera. And we went with it, it was a lot of fun and as you say, I think it’s a pretty fitting finale for old Lester.”

While the themes of their songs may not be pleasant, there’s an element of humour to them as well. It’s the nervous joking you get when everybody knows something bad is about to go down. ‘Vicki The Butcher’ is interrupted by the announcement of a meat raffle, as if the band’s onstage at a pub and the owner has grabbed the mic to sell everyone on their “succulent chops”. “There’s a lot of that lowbrow, sarcastic humour in there,” Scott says, “but it’s not funny in a nice way. It’s picking up the underbelly of what’s around us in inner Melbourne. A lot of it goes unnoticed these days; I guess a lot of wealth is moving in and that sort of thing. Where I am in particular in North Melbourne there’s still a lot of that undertone, that desperation. They’re the sort of characters that our music seems to bring to life.”

That may make it sound like the band’s songs are all the same, but Tales is musically diverse. It speeds up and slows down, has time for a quiet number and a silly throwaway song full of gleeful swearing. Scott says their live show will be more dynamic with these songs in it, a difference their drummer Steve Striker will appreciate. “What we did with the first record is, if it was sitting in a groove we bumped it a little bit to give it a more nervous energy, so we actually – Steve and I – were exercising quite a bit to make sure that we weren’t dying out towards the end of the songs.”