Temps release a new video to promote Party Gator Purgatory

Temps, the 40-strong international music collective put together  by James Acaster, are to release their first album.

Record label Bella Union has announced that the ten-track Party Gator Purgatory will be released on May 19.

And to mark the news, the group have released a video for the new single Bleedthemtoxins, featuring Acaster in his Party Gator guise engaging with East Londoners in and around Victoria Park in Hackney. 

The album was produced, curated and devised by the comedian following an aborted mockumentary he made with Louis Theroux’s money. 

In February 2020, Acaster decided he wanted to make a TV series about himself. Backed by Theroux’s production company, the show would follow him as he dramatically quit stand-up and sidestep into the music industry ‘with great pretension and naivety’.

For a pilot episode, Acaster – who was in a string of teenage bands, – travelled to his hometown of Kettering and collected his childhood drum kit from his parents’ house.

The plan was to drive to a studio in London and record Acaster playing the kit for the first time in over a decade. And on the way they would pick up a human-sized cuddly fluorescent toy alligator sporting pink top hat and a T-shirt reading Party Gator which Acaster had won at a county fair when he was seven.

In the series, the stuffed toy acted as a muse as Acaster recorded his ‘rusty improvisations’. The final scene in the pilot saw Acaster listening back to his drum tracks, declaring them to be too sloppy, and recruiting jazz drummer Seb Rochford to play over the top of them.

Then Covid hid and the mockumentary was scrapped.

But during lockdown he got back in contact with all the musical heroes he had interviewed for his book and podcast Perfect Sound Whatever  and gradually put together the album.

According to the record label, ‘genres were disregarded in favour of tightly-packed experimentalism and the death, afterlife and rebirth of the Party Gator provided conceptual guidance where needed. Everyone was given free reign to do as they pleased then Acaster would cherry pick his favourite bits, "a DIY Gorillaz" being the methodic touchstone.’

‘With each contribution the songs would morph into something new and uncalculated, informing what came next. A freeform rap might encourage a sax solo, a baroque guitar line might prompt a choir of recorders – whatever the track was asking for, it got.’

The transient approach led to the group’s name, Temps. The plan had been for the original Party Gator to feature in the music videos but, shortly after the drum sessions, it was donated to a local school who then unceremoniously dumped it in a skip, so a replica mascot outfit was made to Acaster’s proportions for him to wear in the low-budget shoots.

The comedian said: ‘I became completely obsessed with this project. it was all I focused on for two years and we ended up making my favourite thing ever. I hope people enjoy it.’

His obsession meant he has even drawn the album’s artwork himself, using a trio of highlighter pens.

Preorder the album - described by Bella Union as ‘vast in scope and scale, and fizzing with an experimental energy’ –  here.

Published: 1 Feb 2023